SOURCE: "New Poems," in The New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1975, p. 2.

In this brief review of New Poems, Leibowitz finds the poems exquisitely serene.

Kenneth Rexroth's New Poems, almost exclusively lyrics like "spindles of light," are concerned with "the ecology of infinity." "The endless dark, however, is not a terrifying interstellar hole dwarfing man. Things though in motion are in place. Rexroth's poems are composed of a flash or revelatory image and silent metamorphoses:

 Spring puddles give way
To young grass.
In the garden, willow catkins
Change to singing birds. 

Syntax is cleared of the clutter of subordinate clauses, that contingent grammar of a mind hesitating, debating with itself, raging against death and old age. The dynamics of his poems are marked piano—even storms are luminous rather than noisy. There is no harried quest for consolation: one need only step outdoors and look up at the...