I read Long Island Light with growing disbelief, soon exchanged for acceptance, that in a single volume there could be so many poems celebrating, with perfect pitch, the natural world and what we have made of it. Actually, and to simplify, there are three kinds of poem in this collection; those that revive the frontier through the personalities of early American naturists (Parkman, Washington Irving, George Catlin, Audubon); those "remembered because of violence" that chronicle the necessary, and unnecessary, cruelties of survival, and those in which Heyen follows Jeffers' resolve, "I will touch things and things and no more thoughts," poems that crystallize, with an absence of exhortation, "The pure poise / of an object" (usually a creature—pike, cardinal, swan, the pigeons of Audubon's day—but consummately, the tree in "Oak Autumn").

We are enabled, with many of these poems, to follow their conversion from prose, not to...