[An acclaimed American novelist, short story writer, and poet, Harrison is best known for his fiction but has published nine collections of verse. In the following review, he perceives some flaws in Tape for the Turn of the Year and Corsons Inlet but states: "In both books, I sense a poet on the eve of a breakthrough."]

A. R. Ammons' Tape for the Turn of the Year was composed on a roll of adding machine tape; it purports to be a long poem in the form of a journal covering some thirty-five days in the poet's life. There are a dozen or so things that make it fatally wrong as a long poem—the fact of its length alone was predicated by the size of the tape, its form determined by the width of the tape and the number of days. The whole idea is more than a bit fey; we have weather descriptions, nature walks, all manner of cracker barrel phenomenology; the poet pumping out large unleavened portions of his brain, the day in shorthand, creaking dross, rather house-broken observations on poetics, jokes, much fallow ground that might better have been left that way. It is a disastrously ambitious piece of work; the marriage of the poem and journal a bad one.

Despite these crude reservations Tape for the Turn of the Year has much to recommend itself. There are many fine short lyrics hidden within it, sections of incredible fertility, the texture rich, the poet in completely new territory. I think it is the poem's total intemperance that saves it. Ammons is a poet with an essentially sweet consciousness at home with the quality of strangeness that makes him a very individual poet. Ammons does not limit himself to colonizing like so many of his gifted contemporaries; he explores. When he invokes the muse he does not do so fatuously; rather than the small household god or mistress of the academy that we are accustomed to, she takes the form of the "perpetual other woman" whom poets have served for centuries. It is a tribute to the poet that he sometimes makes her whine in the same sense that John Skelton did in his "Merry Margaret," makes her yield to him the volatile gift of the poem. Ammons writes, "the predator / husbands his prey". He might well take this as a cautionary note for himself, an admonition.

Much of Corsons Inlet is perhaps too typical of the better conservative poetry being written now; a poetry of things closely observed and gracefully described, of the imagination at reasonable harmony with itself. There's a great deal of unpretentious technical solidity and little of the diffuseness and ambling that marred Tape for the Turn of the Year. I think, though, that the more successful poems in the collection are the least orthodox. Of the seven exceptional poems in Corsons Inlet (I would draw attention to "Moment," "Jungle Knot," "Dark Song," "Butterflyweed," "Two Hymns," "The Strait," "Libation"), "Jungle Knot" and "Two Hymns" are truly fine. Our senses rupture, are enlivened, awed; there are no false notes. I quote part of the first of the "Two Hymns":

So when the year had come full round
I rose
and went out to the naked mountain
to see
the single peachflower on the sprout

blooming through a side of ribs possibly a colt's
and I endured each petal separately
and moved in orisons with the sepals …

In both books I sense a poet on the eve of a breakthrough, a poet who has far from exhausted his equipment. I think A. R. Ammons' success—it could have very large dimensions—will depend on his ability to harbor, to cage his gift with greater cunning while still taking those steps in the dark that make his best work so radically original and fresh.