Vital Signs is a selection of Slavitt's work from the last fifteen years, generous in size, in variety, and, most important, in spirit, the kind of book one should not just read, but live with.

Though he is no Yeats or Stevens, Slavitt speaks with his own quiet authority, from a relaxed, almost homely stance. And though he is not, to be sure, blazing new trails in American poetry, his poems have a classical quality which makes innovation seem merely irrelevant. Like [Marilyn] Hacker, he is fond of forms, but unlike her he does not use them as cages to restrain difficult and headstrong emotions; instead (what is more difficult) he simply lets them form themselves into the bodies of the thoughts and feelings they express…. [One] does not expect, from such modest instruments, the depth and range that the poet attains—from sarcastic satire (Financial Statement) to violent anecdote (St. Ebba of Coldingham) to anguished and chastened elegy…. (p. 294)

Learned as well as wise, Slavitt's omnivorous art devours not only his daily experience but the experience of ancient history and fable as well. I say experience, for the poet never uses the classics as pretentious window-dressing, but instead gives more than he takes, restoring to the artifacts the life that time, reverence, and library dust have stolen from them. This concern with retaining life—humor, spontaneity, warmth—in art, is a central theme throughout Slavitt's poetry, and a necessary principle of his aesthetic, for he sees very clearly what has happened to some of his forbears:

    Or they sing, hey-diddle, the cat and the fiddle—but
      even its nine lives prove to be finite,
    And after performing on lengths of its own gut,
      it dies and the music dies. There's a moral in it.

The moral in it, for Slavitt, is that one must turn to one's wit, and wits, one must take up "fooling around" to keep alive, taking chances with tone, form, and rhythm in order constantly to startle artifact into living art. (pp. 294-95)