Welcoming Disaster collects roughly a decade of Jay Macpherson's light verse and mad jottings and brilliant myth-making poems. The volume … is full of bright designs and dark conceits, amphisbaenic or yin-and-yang emblems; invocation, asides, and acknowledgments have all been severely dealt with…. [There] is really no describing a production like this—no substitute for having it. The book has a plot of sorts: at the end of a special and intimate friendship, presumably a love affair, the poet tries to get her capsized vessel afloat through a return to the terrors of childhood and the necessary unmourned losses of adult life. Her injunctions of self-command are directed to, or rather deflected off, a splendid toy bear called Tadwit or Ted, as the sequence moves from consolation to guilt to terror and finally to a deepened consolation. Miss Macpherson looks at her own life as well as Ted when she beckons to a "needed, familiar pain. / Come, little thorn." Surely, Blake would have smiled in baffled delight at the woman who could ask, "Having so much, how is it that we ache for / Those darker others?"; or speak of the search for a blessed monster "through the caverns wild / Where the giant led the child"; or hint, so calmly, at the difficult weight of love…. Yet I am reducing Miss Macpherson's grandness and verve by giving them a name. She will put readers in mind of Graves and Wordsworth, of Auden and Dickinson and Stevie Smith, of every poet who ever wrote truly about innocence and its unlucky master, love.

Dickinson most of all has formed her style. Vast and yet terse-seeming nouns, often new compounds, from physics or fairy tales or the ordinary world; shocks of defiance, longing, propitiation; pet cadences and turns and even a surprising verse form out of the Protestant hymn book; hyphens and dashes, with the queerest kinds of enjambment; above all the conviction that self-scrutiny, an act of unswerving authority and intensity, is the way to self-possession in art: these impressive habits and ideas, odds and ends of a craft, Miss Macpherson has absorbed so that they become her own. (pp. 236-37)

Throughout her sequence Miss Macpherson's "they" refers to nothing in particular: it is the abstract plural of absolute portent, proper to certain types of allegory, which one understands at once in Auden, Kafka, or Edward Lear…. [Her] respect for things-in-general which goes with a belief in their ultimate triumph over herself, makes her not a finer poet than Dickinson but, to my mind, a more neighborly person in her poetry. (pp. 237-38)

A poet who worries about her ability to summon creatures of the imagination, who she knows can never be creatures of the will, is worried about memory and its sovereignty over her: that is Miss Macpherson's theme and her single story…. When she writes of her monsters, Miss Macpherson is tender, high-spirited, mayhem-loving, and filled with awe, as at an Eastern Tale, and then she comes back to Ted…. [The] toy bear looms up cheerfully and strangely, a little god of departed things. (p. 238)

On the cover of her book, Miss Macpherson has a nameless devourer of the deep about to snap its jaws on a boat that drifts helplessly in the sun. The space is two-thirds black with only a sunny triangle left at the top. It gives a curious impression, however, for one of those reasons only the imagination knows not of engulfing darkness but of penetrating light: and it is the perfect emblem for Miss Macpherson's art. (p. 239)