SOURCE: "Lasting Words," Parnassus, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1996, pp. 113-30.

In the following review of Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938, Kirby admires Viereck's sharp wit and his experiments in poetic form but finds many of his poems repetitive rather than original.

Tide and Continuities ("my last because of age and illness," Viereck writes) consists of either three or six parts, depending on how you read a preface that is as full of paradox, irony, and downright contradiction as the poems themselves. The first part consists of new poems written mainly in hospitals; the second comprises four sections of selected poems composed over a sixty-year period; and the third is devoted to long poems that tie the first two parts together.

The book's thematic leitmotifs are as ambitious as its formal architecture. They are, as Viereck sees them, "the seesaw of ambivalence between Persephone and Dionysus; the merging...