Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (1963) came out a year after [Robert Bly's] Silence in the Snowy Fields and resembles it too much for critical comfort. The poems in The Branch, although much more personal and forceful than Wright's earlier efforts, seemed to borrow not so much Bly's honesty as Bly's emotions and subjects. As in Silence, one found the love of mysticism, of abrupt leaps between apparently unconnected material, of solitude, of the instant of extraordinary perception, of playful, scene-setting titles ("As I Step Over a Puddle …"), of dusk and small plains towns, and of animals and nature. Occasionally, however, Wright's differences from Bly emerged and clashed with the Bly adaptations: Wright did not share Bly's Whitmanesque attraction to death; Midwestern bleakness was just that for him; solitude was often as painful as it was exquisite; and the Midwest was not only the locale of Minnesota farms...