Phillip Lopate's new book ["The Daily Round"] is titled perfectly. The daily round is exactly what he writes about, and a damned, dull, dreadful, despairing round it is too, most of the time. Oh, occasionally a tentative cheer for the sunset in the park, a dry exclamation at the sight of a girl with her jeans off; sometimes there's even a gasp of refreshing radical anger. But the prevailing tone is melancholy: specifically, the melancholy of New York.

Lopate may deny, as he explicitly does in one poem, that he thinks New York—or the world—is going down the drain, but in the face of the rest of the poems it is a hollow denial.

So we may have what we have had before from older poets like Ignatow and Reznikoff, from many younger poets of Lopate's own generation: details of emptiness, spiritual malaise in the city...