SOURCE: "Ambushes of Amazement," in The American Book Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, September-October, 1987, p. 11.

Oppenheimer is a poet and critic. In the following review, he finds that the poems in The Rings of Saturn succeed when they skillfully employ surrealist techniques.

Modern surrealism, starting with Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the word back in 1917, usually promises more than it delivers. If the promise, to quote André Breton's surrealist manifesto, is art and poetry full of "previously neglected forms of association," brimming with magic, leaps beyond reason, and hallucinations, the delivery, more often than not, is either trite or incomprehensible. "Automatic writing," another "method" favored by some surrealists, frequently combines perfectly trivial insights with failed grammar. These lapses are more apparent in surrealist poetry than in the painting, where the technical mastery of the artist—Max Ernst, say, or Duchamp or Dali or Klee—plus sheer intelligence and wit, may manage...