Daniel Hoffman's poems are affective. His poems convey the sense of a mood that hovers around an experience, and becomes part of the experience. To show what I mean by this, I must use a word that is no longer popular: skill. In reading Hoffman's poetry, the awareness of skill serves many purposes, one of them is to evoke a sense of becoming, a sense of how the outer world begins to move into our feelings.

The awareness of skill is unavoidable in his poetry and is part of its pleasure…. The awareness of a poet's skill has a greater or lesser degree of relevance, and the poems particularly susceptible to a "new critical" reading are those where the awareness of skill is intended to be quite high…. In Hoffman's poetry, the awareness of skill, from a reader's point of view, should be, I suggest, that of the...