SOURCE: “A Poet on the Painter,” in New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1975, p. 39.

In the following essay, Brinnin provides a positive assessment of Hazard, The Painter.

Unlike most collections of poems, this one has a named hero and an overt subject. The hero is an aging liberal, a painter called Hazard; the subject is Hazard's attempt somehow to maintain himself as one who “participates in the divinity of the world.” But we meet him at a bad time, when his hopes are dashed, his guard down. While the newly victorious Nixon gang is putting it together and the kid next door with her Rolling Stones on stereo is getting it together, Hazard is trying simply to keep it together. Work at his easel should help, but even that has hit a bad patch—for two years now “he has been painting, in a child's palette /—not the...