Read poet for painter [in "Hazard, The Painter"], and the changes that can be rung on identity quickly present themselves. The delicate social conscience of the man Meredith gives us is convincing, but his credibility as an artist is not. His one obsessive subject is more of a poet's concept than a painter's pictorial "fact," and the pictures registered in his memory are sometimes uneasily close to those of a Norman Rockwell nudged by Social Realism. In poetic terms, Meredith takes us into a region recently charted by the knuckleboned asperities of Robert Lowell and by the vaudeville turns of conscience played out in the "Dream Songs" of John Berryman. If such influences pave his way, they do so without getting in his way. Meredith's language is often as lean as Lowell's and as rhythmically adroit as Berryman's. His tone has the consistency of an achieved mode and...