Throughout [Growing-Points], poems in Ms. Jennings's familiar meters and stanzas alternate with largely unsuccessful attempts to find a substitute for the largely unsuccessful experiments with prose poetry and free verse of earlier volumes in experiments with long lines, irritatingly printed in ugly run-ons.

My guess is that Ms. Jennings writes too much and probably publishes all of it. There are some very good poems and passages here, all right, but you need to do a lot of weeding. What is particularly upsetting is to find, say, a truly exceptional quatrain—and there are several of these—in a poem that is otherwise uninteresting, or a distinguished and original line sandwiched between banalities. It's too bad. My objections, in general, are to clichés of diction and imagery which appear with some regularity, from the autumn leaves of the first poem to the sunrise and sunset of the last...