Not since Robert Hass's first book have I encountered a debut so seductive as Katha Pollitt's [Antarctic Traveller], poems so determined to be beguiled by the world that we cannot peer between them to the sour scrawling self that writes, an inky revenge. What Pollitt wants, what she creates, is the alternative life, unconditioned, eagerly espousing all that is unknown…. But she is shrewd, too, and passionately disabused by moments, intervals of chagrin "when suddenly 'choices' / ceased to mean 'infinite possibilities' / and became instead 'deciding what to do without' …" So there is a wariness about these ecstasies, so readily bestowed, so rashly withdrawn. It can be anything—any delight of physical recognition is enough to set Pollitt off, to light her up like an electric field, wherein any correspondence takes her into other minds, other worlds, back country, desertion of the usual….

Stevens is here …, and Elizabeth Bishop...