One [book] I have read with marked satisfaction is Brewster Ghiselin's Country of the Minotaur. Ghiselin's meditative lyrics, many of which evoke the grandeur of the Pacific Coast, may remind us of Robinson Jeffers. Without the cranky misanthropy that mars so much of Jeffers's work, Ghiselin has a similar awe for nature's immensity and otherness. The beauty of the world can never be domesticated; yet it is Ghiselin's triumph to have placed man in the midst of nature, without smoothing down any of its roughness, and then to have shown man to be something more than an intruder in this world…. [In his writing Ghiselin] sounds depths which few other contemporary poets have reached. In the masterful poem Sea he celebrates the ocean as the beginning and the end of all things…. There is a tidal movement in Ghiselin's lines, and an expansive scriptural eloquence in his language…. (pp. 343-44)

Robert B. Shaw, "The Long and Short of It," in Poetry (© 1972 by The Modern Poetry Association; reprinted by permission of the Editor of Poetry), Vol. CXIX, No. 6, March, 1972, pp. 342-55.∗