[While many] poets have had to pluck up or come to terms with their grass roots before freely inhabiting a further subject, David Slavitt suffers from no such disability; child of the Eastern seaboard, and much more, he has no wilderness to exorcize. His ironic humanism is the beneficiary of three sources: his Hebraic ancestry, his education in the classical tongues and his New England residence. These divide fairly equally his interests as a poet; nearly all the contingent subjects in [Vital Signs, his] copious collection (186 poems, of which 83 are designated New Poems) are broadly accounted for by his triple inheritance. From it he has derived a sense of tragic futility in human pretensions, acquired poise, learned patience—and adopted cynicism enough to acknowledge, with Dr. Johnson, that "Nonsense we can live with is better than truth." (He never writes nonsense.) I don't know exactly what Joyce Carol Oates meant when she said, in praise, that "the near-ubiquitous voice of the era seems generally absent in Slavitt" (I'm not even sure how many poets speak with that voice!). Ubiquity is Slavitt's occupational hazard, more often his glory. He handles forensic issues as deftly as the private grief and there's scarcely a contemporary shibboleth (tourism, high-jackers, Western movies, Plymouth Rock, the welfare state, militant women) at which he doesn't cast an eye: not a cold one; the labor he delights in physics cold. The contemporary mind, especially in the U.S.A., is unable to conceive that intellectual disenchantment is not synonymous with the absence of lively curiosity. The iniquities of history and the tiresome rebirth of True Believers need not affect our reconciliation with life, nor prevent our recognizing that all recovery is a necessary illusion. In the long run Slavitt agrees with Ortega: "To say that we live is the same as saying that we find ourselves in an atmosphere of definite possibilities." (Note especially "The Clearing" or the poem that supplies the title to this volume, where the poet stares into the "unpatched eye" of pain's "private face," "looking for company, for comfort, vital signs.").

If Slavitt would rather be a hammer than a nail, he knows how the nail feels but his compassion is restrained by the shrewd inference that few mortals deserve compassion…. He's his own man, as Miss Oates remarked, yet he speaks with divers tongues…. He inhabits history and the world of poetic forms as playfully as an otter its fluvial element; with no audible panting, he commands a diversity of stanzaic constructs and syllabic line-counts, tosses off ballads, sestinas, sonnets, ottava rima, dramatic monologues in unrhymed strophes of varying meters. Something like a duality, but not quite, offers itself to the intent reader: salvation as Odysseus or as Candide—the crafts of cutting loose or of cultivating one's garden, which amount to the same thing: art…. I don't know if anyone recognizes that in Slavitt Americans have their own Cavafy, their own Auden. That's much to have…. (pp. 595-97)