[In the following excerpt, Carruth reviews Praise favorably and includes Hass among the many individual talents "inventing" poetry today.

When we open a book at random and read this:

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. We have walked the city,
a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god
who sings in the desolation of filth and money
a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn
otherwise. Otherwise the ranked monochromes,
the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us
as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.
What a fierce small privacy of consolation.
What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat …

we have found a poet who knows, loves, and uses the great tradition, knowing, too, that it is never pedantic, never self-imitative, but always moving its huge chords through the modulations of individual sensibilities. This is the first stanza of a poem by Robert Haas, whose first book won the Yale Younger Poets competition several years ago, and whose new and second book, Praise, is a notable advance. My quotation gives only an inkling of what he can do; he writes in many shapes, moods, even styles. Yet everywhere one recognizes this reverence for the power of language, words in their gull-flight of syntax, what we—or our ancestors—used to call eloquence. There are many pleasures in poetry, and for my part, being incorrigibly maverick, I'd lose none of them. One of the greatest is discovering that the language of one's youth, Shakespeare's or Yeats's (and of course it is both), is not dead, has not been refined out of existence. The mainstream does not dry up; it deepens and widens. Think of jazz. Charlie Parker was a revolution, not to say revelation, from whom sprang the line of Rollins, Coltrane, Shepp, whom we would be loath to do without; but long after Parker such men as Ben Webster and Paul Gonsalvez were finding impetus and invention in the central evolution of jazz; and today we have Scott Hamilton. Yes, many pleasures. And in this review I have been lucky enough to catch poets who give us a broad sampling of them. I hope readers will take to them all—always acknowledging the prerogatives of taste—and to Robert Haas as much as the others.