SOURCE: "More than Naive Confessions," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 4, 1984, p. 4.

In this review ofThe Collected Greed, Parts 1-13, Funsten asserts that the collection represents Wakoski's maturity as a poet and that the work goes beyond the confessional style she is known for.

Since 1962, when Diane Wakoski's first book of poetry, Coins and Coffins, appeared, she has enchanted fans and offended critics. No one, it seems, straddles the line. One camp calls Wakoski entertaining, sincere, instructive; the other scoffs—and often with angry contempt—that she is prosy, crude, sentimental, moralizing. The only opinion that both seem to share is that Wakoski writes a form of "confessional poetry." But as her newest book, The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13, shows, Wakoski is writing something immensely more promising than naive confession.

Wakoski began Greed in 1967 at the behest of John Martin, who was looking for experimental...