The Daily Round is dedicated to Pasternak, and the title poem to Mandelstem, and the book as a whole explores the malaise of the unattached urban American—the '60s survivor who has abandoned the assumptions and liberties of that decade and taken a stand in a solitary, sober "daily round" of job, apartment, friends, and lovers. Lopate is new to me, and I found real distinction in many of these poems, or more specifically in the poet's voice, which is both the instrument and the product of Lopate's concerns….

[The] exuberance of the '60s was a little wearing on us all—every extreme seems to exact its payment—and in Lopate's poems there is real evidence that the poet has found a viable alternative in accepting his own limits, as well as his own demands, for better or for worse. The self is the unit upon...