[John James] Audubon's art is muscular and avid: his birds and his rats alike inhabit a world of beak and claw and fang, of ripped-open bellies and planted talons. Violence caught in act, at the heart of Audubon's work, is at the heart too of [Audubon: A Vision] where Robert Penn Warren retells with his peculiar narrative Ancient-Mariner talent, a raw incident of craftiness, torture, and death, purportedly witnessed by Audubon.

The incident seems considerably milder as it appears in Audubon's recollections of the prairie; Warren's version has more sex, more murder, and more poetry. Warren's narrative, like the two stories of wretched death in his Incarnations (1968), is horribly memorable in plot, while the language tends very often to efface itself in pure transparency. Warren can make a climax out of five unremarkable words (as Audubon lies transfixed in a cabin, threatened with murder)—"He hears the jug...