[Poems of Thirty Years] brings together a vast amount of original work remarkable for its variety and skill. The skill is sometimes frittered away on sound and concrete poems, which may be fun to write and to utter but are not much fun to read. There are also elegies which feel merely dutiful and love poems notable for their lack of any intense feeling at all; yet these failures do not greatly matter. Morgan's imagination is not much stirred by the purely personal, but against that is the fact that he is an exuberantly inventive poet. Poems of Thirty Years is thoroughly entertaining, because although you never know quite what will come next you know that sooner or later you will come upon a poem that takes hold.

This is particularly true of his handling of that most unpromising of genres, the science fiction poem. Most sci-fi poems...