[Every] now and then a poet sets out to fashion his own atmosphere. It is an enormous risk. William Heyen has taken that risk and succeeded. Long Island Light must be compared to Lowell's Life Studies, for it combines autobiographical lyrics with a prose memoir. Lowell brought his practical life into focus with Life Studies; Heyen is unwilling to clarify his early life, preferring to fluctuate between dream and fact, both in the poems that constitute sections I and III of his collection and in the prose memoir which is its central element. (p. 81)

The memoir is haunting—sometimes so much so that it drowns the lyric force of the poems that derive from it. There are powerful, understated segments—the story of Heyen's teacher Richard Purdum who committed suicide, the account of the wild cats that terrorized his childhood neighborhood, the detailed reflections upon the changes in...