"Segues" is written by William Stafford and Marvin Bell, two of America's most respected poets. Theirs is an ambitious experiment, and while the quality of the poetry is uneven, their book is a refreshingly novel event on the literary scene….

[The poetry of "Segues" began when Stafford and Bell] decided to collaborate on a writing project to strengthen their friendship and explore the ways a poem comes into being. Stafford began the chain of "verse letters," and each successive poem grew out of the subject, tone, or language of the previous one. A long-distance version of the ancient Japanese renga (linked verse), their correspondence was a form of mutual inspiration, making a poetic duet from what is usually a private solo performance. The title "Segues" is a term for the transitions inside a piece of music that allow one theme to grow into another.

Certainly more is required of a book than the novelty of the poems' call-and-answer progression to make any lasting impression on the reader. Of the 44 poems in the collection, only a handful are strong enough to stand on their own merits. Stylistically, this work is a marked contrast to many of the popular trends in poetry; they have none of the oblique, hard-edged lines, vaguely surreal visions, or self-conscious absorption in the surface qualities of verse. The writing possesses some of the intimacy of letters and the give-and-take of good conversation—two practices nearly extinct in American social life. Stafford and Bell are conversational, even voluble, in their writing, paying most attention to the subject at hand and the emotional tone. At times the relaxed atmosphere of this correspondence brings out their worst tendencies, allowing slack, unfocused lines or thin philosophical pronouncements that dilute the poem's effect….

Bell's poetry usually relies on sudden twists of diction and focus. He adopts some of Stafford's simplicity here in autobiographical pieces about his family and childhood. By and large, these poems aren't as well crafted as his previous work, displaying less control but providing more emotional involvement.

But in a curious way, "Segues" is a better book than the sum of its table of contents. Some of the most interesting moments seem to occur behind and between the actual poems. There is the feeling of true correspondence in these poems—not just the "letter" variety but also the sympathetic reverberation between two visions….

At the conclusion, the sense of culmination is more involved with the poets' bond than the poems' subject matter. But the reader is left with several strong impressions: first, that the book describes a greater human landscape than was initially apparent, implied more than defined by the individual poems in the way flares in a night sky provide glimpses of the broad countryside; second, a reaffirmation that the greatest strength of modern poems lies not in the surface dazzle and linguistic effects, but in the way a work impels a reader's imagination to be involved with the creation of its subject; and third, as these writers discovered, that there is more common emotional ground in the literary arts than the caustic visions that are becoming the sanctioning elements of much contemporary writing.