[One of the foremost contemporary American poets, Rich also writes criticism from a feminist perspective. In the following review of Found Objects, she evaluates Zukofsky's verse in terms of the poetic traditions that shaped it.]

Zukofsky calls this collection Found Objects because, as he states in his fore-note, "nature as creator had more of a hand in it than one was aware. The work then owns something of the look of found objects in late exhibits—which arrange themselves as it were, one object near another—roots that have become sculpture, wood that appears talisman, and so on: charms, amulets, maybe, but never really such things since the struggles so to speak that made them do not seem to have been human trials and evils—they appear entirely natural." One could perhaps make out a case for his title, but this would not be it. The image I receive of this poet, through this collection, is one of a delicate, civilized, intensely serious man, committed to an enormous, self-conscious struggle with language and tradition. The poems themselves are delicate yet often labored, a contradiction sometimes successful, sometimes not. Zukofsky brings to the battle some inherited stratagems of Pound (heavy use of allusion and quotation) and Williams (a short, breath-phrased line, too often here a one word line). One wonders if nature—instinctual wisdom—might not have led him to drop the greaves and breastplate of those great old warriors and to step, finally, light and self-exposing, into the fray. Yet, while it could hardly be said that Zukofsky's poems "appear entirely natural", it is true that beyond the heirlooms of tradition he exists, very much himself, in his melancholy love of things, his wariness of movement, his finely-strung consciousness of self. "Roots that have become sculpture"—no, not sculpture, the image is too massive unless one takes it as the most searching and spidery of petrified filaments: "… the simultaneous / The diaphanous, historical / In one head."

Take for example his long "Mantis," an especially interesting poem in its interplay of Zukofskian motives and concerns, and not only Zukofskian at that. It begins with a formal, iambically-grounded sestina on a praying mantis flown or blown up out of a subway entrance. There follows a six-page "interpretation", or meditation, on the possible reasons, justifications, conditions under which a sestina can be written today even though "—Our world will not stand it / the implications of a too-regular form". This meditation or analysis, in open verse, begins by giving the poem as it originally started, also in open verse, short-lined, impressionistic. It goes on to argue why it was impossible to write the poem this way (complexity, both intellectual and sensual, demanding more than simply "to write it up"); and to ask why Victorian formalism seemed blind, cruel, and smug, yet why in order to write of the mantis in terms of "the oppression of the poor" it was necessary to borrow back the detested formalism, the "wicker-work". Whatever the faults of the "interpretation" as poetry, it is an interesting study of one deliberately, consciously avant-garde poet's pain and concern with the possible limitations of two traditions—the Anglo-European mainstream containing Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Bible, the great formal structures—and the regenerative American breakthrough of the early part of this century, with its demands for a more spontaneous measure, for a closer look at things, for an independent movement belonging to the American inflection and the American consciousness. I wish Zukofsky might undertake what is clearly the task of all today who, like him, want the best of both worlds—the work of fusion, not in separate sections of one poem, or in separate poems, but in individual lines and whole poems: the coming honestly and uniquely by the "torsion" of grace and ungainliness, casualness and splendor.