William Heyen's Depth of Field is a brilliant first volume with a broad, coherent, and deeply moving design. The book is divided into two sections, The Spirit of Wrath and The Dead from Their Dark. Beginning in a confessional vein, Heyen confronts in separate poems the images of two uncles, one a German infantryman, the other a pilot of a Stuka, killed in the Second World War. The poet must face his personal heritage of the spirit of wrath, but he finds that it is the common heritage:

              Because the cause is never just,
              rest, my Nazi uncle, rest.
            All the oppressors are oppressed.
            The dog's heart is his only beast.
 
            … These are all your wars.
            Asia trembles. You are never dead….

It is the characteristic confessional theme, the confrontation of man's animality and its consequences, which occupies in one way or another the rest of the poems...