SOURCE: "Quiet Satisfaction," in Times Literary Supplement, May 30, 1980, p. 620.

In the following review, Kirby gives a favorable assessment of The Morning Star.

The first section of The Morning Star consists of very short poems, glimpses of the natural world with or without the human presence:

     On the forest path
     The leaves fall. In the withered
     Grass the crickets sing
     Their last songs. Through dew and dusk
     I walk the paths you once walked,
     My sleeves wet with memory.

What is attempted here is the directness and clarity more commonly associated with Japanese than with Western art, a method which the haiku poet Noboru Fujiwara has described as "a weeding out of all that would clutter, muddy, confuse, leading to great incisiveness, clear purpose." Reviewing Rexroth's One Hundred Poems from the Chinese (in the June 1957 number of Poetry), William Carlos Williams commented on the absence of metaphor in Oriental...