[In this review of The Signature of All Things, Golffing praises the poems for their combination of cosmic feeling and unclouded judgment.]

When several years ago I reviewed Mr. Rexroth's The Phoenix and the Tortoise for these pages, I entertained certain doubts about the solidity of his poetic procedure. The free verse flowed a little too freely and at times could scarcely be read as verse; the lines, though crisp throughout, tended to become brittle; and there were obvious faults of style—a fondness for abstract catalogues, an unfleshing of the idea till nothing was left but the bare conceptual bone—which vitiated some of his finest productions. Many of the poems were alive with an almost uncanny insight, while others seemed to meander through channels of intellectual irrelevance or be flushed hectically with some undiscoverable excitement. A rift could be noticed in these verses between intelligence and sensibility: the intelligence usually working like a scalpel, subtle yet unpitying, in a few instances thrashing about wildly, like a flail; the sensibility reserved for the writer's personal pieties which were set forth with that microscopic precision we bestow on the things we love most. Yet the poems of the latter type, no matter how delightful, were largely outside the scope of intellect: they relied for effect on a very curious blend of sensuality and tenderness, and on the careful rendering of physical minutiae. A general misanthropy thus came to exist alongside of flights of affection almost extravagant in their intensity, with no middle ground and scarcely any recognition of the rift.

The present collection goes a long way toward closing it. Not that it has been bridged entirely: there are still instances here of that utter revulsion from the common run of humanity which disfigured the earlier volume. (Disfigured: not because the human animal does not justify such a reaction—it may or may not—but because the exploitation of that reaction makes for cheap poetry. Not even Swift succeeded at this kind of verse, except once or twice.) Yet, while still an atomist by persuasion, Mr. Rexroth now manages to populate his globe with luminous energetic matter to create a constant interplay of lively forces from which no being is any longer excluded. The "ingots of quivering phosphorescence" he celebrates in one of his poems, the "scattered chips of pale cold light that was alive" are mind and matter in one; and the poet has come to assume the role of the magus, the decipherer of hieroglyphics, interpreting "these ideograms/Printed on the immortal/Hydrocarbons of flesh and stone." Read in these terms, each of Mr. Rexroth's poems appears as a dogged effort to reclaim living substance from decay; and, if the reading is right, we are justified in considering the erotic poems as an extreme instance of the same concern. The body of woman, so persistently extolled, is yet recognized for what it is to worm and undertaker; at the same time, this fragile frame, this lump of matter cries out for its own eternity, an eternity never settled once and for all but in need of constant renewal or better: revalidation:

It may be
Some distraught, imagined girl,
Amalfi's duchess, Electra,
Struggles like an ice bound swan,
Out of the imagination,
Toward a body, beside me,
Beyond the corner of the eye;
Or, may be, some old jealousy
Or hate I have forgotten
Still seeks flesh to walk in life.

Whether he reads the lineaments of a cherished face, the runes of ancient rock or the stellar enigma, Mr. Rexroth is concerned with the living mystery they disclose, with the stream rising in an anonymous past, feeding the brief present and running on into a nameless future:

Majestic, from the most distant time,
The sun rises and sets.
Time passes and men cannot stop it.
The four seasons serve them,
But do not belong to them.
The years flow like water.
Everything passes away before my eyes.
… Borne headlong
Towards the long shadows of sunset
By the headstrong, stubborn moments,
Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.

An essentially monistic conception, this, to which Lao-tse and Democritus have stood joint godfathers. Whether or not we endorse the poet's underlying beliefs, we must acknowledge the grandeur of the conception; nor can Mr. Rexroth be accused of wanton irrationality. There is no hint here of that studied disdain, so fashionable today, for the powers of judgment, no large statements spilling over the edges of the poem. What may strike the casual reader as the poet's private mystique is simply the aura within which the mind accepts, rejects, qualifies, subtilizes. Good examples of this combination of cosmic feeling and unclouded judgment may be found throughout the Chineseinspired cycles; another instance is "Epigram I" where our temporal categories are made to scatter before the thunderbolt of momentary insight:

The bleeding hearts in the garden
Bloom early, but never fruit.
Every year they have spread further,
Underground, by creeping rootstocks.
Zeno's arrow in my heart,
I float in the plunging year.

Poems such as this are truly ideograms—dense clusters of meaning compressed into the compass of a pregnant symbol. No higher commendation is needed for any poem.