Muriel Rukeyser is a poet of dark music, weighty and high-minded. The Speed of Darkness, the title of her new book, is indicative of the oracular soothsaying quality of much of her writing—for me, a defeating tendency of her style which often nullifies any attentiveness to detail. Her mystical vision is so dominant in the mentality of some poems, the writing becomes inscrutable, as she packs her lines with excessive symbolism or metaphorical density.

Her firmest art is in the linear and straightforward delivery of her story-telling anecdotal poems, the longer biographical poems, and letter-poems to friends expressing an open declaration of personal faith. In all of these genres, her symbolism is balanced by clean, open statement. In "Endless" and "Poem" …, personal lyrics irradiating pathos from the recollection of harrowing life-moments, Miss Rukeyser achieves a naïve forthrightness—an artlessness—which, as in the most lastingly valuable...