SOURCE: Mariani, Paul. “The Mother Tongue.” America 184, no. 14 (23-30 April 2001): 25-6.

In the following review, Mariani celebrates the influence of both famous and non-famous authors on the poems in Electric Light.

Because Seamus Heaney and I are of an age, and because he has been my secret talisman and guide now for over 30 years, he an Irish Catholic from Derry, I a mongrel Catholic from New York, every book he has published since his first, Death of a Naturalist, has been an event for me. The question I keep asking myself is how he has done it and continues to do it. Each new book offers new surprises, and these take time to digest and absorb. Surprises in terms of language, in terms of metaphor, in terms of new gains in poetic consciousness, Electric Light is no exception.

Three books of critical prose, a play and this—his...