Nothing in my experience quite prepared me for the excitement I felt in reading Phyllis Webb's Selected Poems. But it was an excitement tempered by a real exasperation with the book's design…. [Often], I got lost in the book, and finally was forced to write simply about what I could remember. One does not read a poetry book straight through. But if John Hulcoop is right in his careful introduction, Miss Webb shows an important development in her poems. To acknowledge this development vis-à-vis such an inconsiderate design, seems almost impossible. But all this is, I hope, academic. In Selected Poems, Miss Webb's poetry blazes into life as terrifying as love, and as necessary. For these are poems that both shape "the world in the intimate/terms of self" and follow the "Flights of the mind from the/earth."

Miss Webb's concerns are the concerns of most...