At her best, Katha Pollitt writes vividly in her own idiom of cultivated poise and reflection…. I admire [the simplicity of "Blue Window," the opening poem of Antarctic Traveller], which comes from steadiness of mind, and the deft use of the impersonal "you" to distance the author from her "self"—the illusion of which is, after all, the subject of the poem.

Not all her poems are so good. She makes heavy use of the "you," which has become an irritating mannerism passed around the various M.F.A. programs like the German measles. She has also picked up the most common, and boring, mannerism of all: beginning poems with a vaguely mysterious indefinite nominative pronoun…. Nevertheless, poets should be judged by their successes, and Pollitt accumulates enough of these in Antarctic Traveller to make its publication an occasion. In "Composition in Black and White," for instance, she...