[Leslie Norris's] views are ordered, rhymed, and syntactically finished. Poems such as Old Voices and Early Frost almost overflow with the melodious streams of Dylan Thomas …, but even then control and reason dominate. The typical mode is that of a weakly affirmative reverie tried out before a landscape, though the best poem in the book, A True Death, is a strongly reassuring elegy for Vernon Watkins. There are twenty-three poems on thirty pages, with very little stanzaic or prosodic inventiveness…. The phrases here place the objects in a temporal and spatial setting which is a trifle too set-up. Personal space loses itself in the traditional poetic environment. (p. 111)

Charles Molesworth, "Some Locals," in Poetry (© 1972 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), Vol. CXX, No. 2, May, 1972, pp. 107-13.∗