The title poem [of Richard Tillinghast's The Knife and Other Poems] evokes the knife as a passive symbol, like Whitman's broad-axe or Dickey's helmet: a hard, masculine image of potential violence, and yet, in this poem as in Whitman's and more obliquely in Dickey's, an image quite literally of brotherhood…. The knife itself is rich in ambiguity: it is a weapon as well as tool, it cuts open a fish and yet becomes the object by which brotherly love is demonstrated.

"The Knife" suggests that the tie between men is also a tie between men and the real world of objects; suggests that the proper use of these objects is to enrichen their lives, not to kill or destroy or misuse the earth. "The unstoppable live water" in which the brother dives is the stark cold reality of aging and the passage of time, as in "time is...