[Porter's "Family Album"] is all too easy, too foreseeable, and too clever. Darkness, despair, and death are handed the victory without a struggle and apparently without cost to the poet, who passes off as insight or as truth what is merely the available, conventional resolution of the poem. Reading these things one trembles, as Kierkegaard said, "at the thought of what it is to be a man." (p. 310)

Richard Pevear, in The Hudson Review (copyright © 1976 by The Hudson Review, Inc.; reprinted by permission), Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Summer, 1976.