SOURCE: "Wakoski Poetry Aging with Concrete Realities," in Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1982, p. 11.

Eshleman is American poet and translator. In the following review, he praises the concrete imagery of The Magician's Feastletters, the specific objects that are the basis of the poems. Eshleman also comments on the book's theme of aging in contemporary American society.

I don't believe anyone has addressed the suddenness with which American poetry has gone abstract in the past decade. In fact the "new" has, overnight, become a kind of writing in which story has disappeared from narration, and narration itself has become so discontinuous that nonsense, in many instances, seems to have usurped imagination. While it is true that "A man died on the road" is not much of a line of poetry, neither is "Death on the deep knees of the fish."

At a mid-point between the literal and nonsensical, a line...