["There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978" is] filled with odd angles of vision, but it lacks the kind of spectral music it seems to need. It's a poetry that mixes the bizarre and commonplace, but its accents are prosaic: "I have been seeing dragons again." And in another poem, "We are in a cell of civilized magic." There's a witty poem spoken through the persona of a young Queen Elizabeth I, and another about Henri Rousseau and the wealthy women who collect his paintings. But often there are juxtapositions that aren't sharp enough….

[The] lack of a driving or lilting music and the barren punctuation create a disembodied effect.

This is a poetry that relies on a hushed approach, and on occasion its claims sound helpless and confused: "My mind is pouring chaos/in nets onto the page." But there is a yearning...