[In 'Poet's Work', Niedecker typifies her poetic activity as 'condensery.' It is an] activity that, at its worst, is much like that of the white ants' mandibles nibbling away Sappho's full-bodied poems into so many passionate haiku. There is a sense of strain in much of her condensery, of observations nipped timidly in the bud, of a cut out detail of a print framed as a genuine miniature, of the lopped top few inches of a fir passed off as a bonzai. She admits to having Basho on her mind and has a section called 'In Exchange for Haiku', and as one follows the other, generously displayed in appropriate white spaces, one has the feeling of mounting panic like watching a child go blue in the face from holding its breath too long, a sort of Black Mountain hara-kiri. Some of the shortest poems are of a...