SOURCE: "The Threading of the Year," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Vols. 18 & 19, Nos. 2 & 1, 1993, pp. 277-88.

In the following excerpt, Barber contends that Rexroth's most poised and mature poetry was influenced by his direct observation of the Northern California landscape.

Although it's evident that Rexroth's radical disaffection from the centers of official culture made the Bay Area an appealing base of operations, it's also plain that his embrace of the California hinterlands stemmed from impulses at least as elemental as ideological. An avid and delicate alertness to his adopted region's natural history, a charged responsiveness to its open sprawl and utter scale, ground the more durable passages in In What Hour, revealing backcountry affinities and reflective leanings one doesn't usually associate with hardboiled anarchists:

 Autumn in California is a mild
And anonymous season, hills and valleys
Are colorless then, only the sooty green
Eucalyptus, the conifers and oaks sink...