Frederick Morgan's "A Book of Change" was not written to be writing poetry. A great many of these poems were obviously written to shape, explore and understand emotions and thus master rather than be mastered by them. Others are love poems, poems that welled up in memory, and poems that attempt to frame and fix transient meditations. These are the age-old offices of poetry, and Mr. Morgan always writes with the age-old belief that poetry is a social bond, like language itself, and that poetry is the more meaningful for being public, transparent and eloquent.

Mr. Morgan's voice keeps to the tradition which modern poets do not even read, much less imitate … but he does not imitate, nor does he deal in pastiche. His images are as sharp as his language: "The love of the jaybird for the rose," "the Centaur, who had kept watch of the years...