SOURCE: A review of Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, in Ironwood, Vol. 16, Fall, 1980, pp. 92-100.

In the following review, Lazer praises as having "lighter" and "looser" poems than the much-acclaimed, unified work that preceded it, The Book of Nightmares.

In "The Age of Criticism," Randall Jarre 11 writes that "most people understand that a poet is a good poet because he does well some of the time." That certainly is the case with Galway Kinnell's writing and with Kinnell's latest book. I'm sure that some readers will find it inferior to The Book of Nightmares, possibly because Mortal Acts, Mortal Words is lighter, less unified, and looser. But these two books are different. Mortal Acts, Mortal Words is a collection of poems, in fact, of several different kinds of poems. The Book of Nightmares is a book of poems, a single sequence of poems intended to be read as a...