James Tate's Torches was a complete disappointment, which at first just irritated and then angered me. It seemed as if Tate had gathered up unused images, put them into a machine, and ground out poems like inferior sausages. Any poet has a fondness for his weak poems, but this is no excuse for finding them comfortable homes. They should be strangled, and the poet should move on.

I'm sure I wouldn't have been so disappointed if I hadn't read Tate before. The book has a few good poems, but none of them are up to other things he has done….

The ending of [The Sleepers], and of most of the poems in this book, seems gratuitous. It's quite easy to compile any number of images, tack on a line like James Wright's "I have wasted my life," and call it a poem. At best the endings in this...