The impulse behind William Heyen's new book, Long Island Light: Poems and a Memoir, is both personal and sincere, and for the first several pages it seems that this is all there is to the volume. The early poems present almost entirely literal descriptions of Heyen's youth, spent on Long Island…. The poems are pleasant and well written, in the plain style, and the pages turn quickly. It is not until later that the reader begins to recognize the mythic undertones of this work, for Heyen injects his more resonant material subtly and quietly, largely through the images that he uses.

As Heyen writes about his early life on Long Island, he inevitably talks about how the Island has changed over the years, always away from nature towards urbanization. His home was surrounded by woods, and next door lived a man, Wenzel, who grew and harvested crops, raised...