In some ways, Long Island Light … might be seen as a manual for how to do the variations of Modern American Poetry with enormous success…. [One] finds a flexible but always patterned structure to [Heyen's] work such that he seems both intensely private and confidently public.

I am tempted … to describe Heyen as an ecstatic poet and a nature poet. He stands in the line of the Emersonian visionary and his poems evoke contemporary models of the line: Roethke, Dickey, James Wright, Robert Bly, and more prominently now Galway Kinnell. As poet he is extremely close to the land, to the sea, to the beasts and fish and fowl, and he hurts because the "land smells of metal." He feels almightily the powerful and wild energy that for the American ecstatic poet has been pretty nearly the single possible sacramental connection. And he feels, too, the darkness of...