[American Journal] is characteristically spare and lyrical. Hayden chooses his words with more care than most poets use, and there is also a kind of formal ghost hovering behind his lines, so that his free-verse stanzas seem almost to have resolved themselves into something more traditional. Their holding back is what gives them their charm, however. (p. 87)

What is most pleasing about his work is the delicacy and care with which he takes the common tongue, including nicknames and slang, and manages to place every word so cleanly in his lines that a kind of bright, varied mosaic emerges. On a larger scale, this is tied esthetically to his method in "Middle Passage" (A Ballad of Remembrance, 1962), which cuts and splices documents as well as the spoken word. But here, as in the central sequence, "Elegies for Paradise Valley," the individual tiles are plucked from the language we speak, and that common language is balanced against the strictness of the form of each brief section. As in section V, where the form is the counter-weight to the sadness and risky catalogue of names:

    And Belle, the classy dresser, where is she,
    who changed her frock three times a day?
         Where's Nora, with her laugh, her comic flair,
         stagestruck Nora waiting for her chance?
    Where's fast Iola, who so loved to dance
    she left her sickbed one last time to whirl
    in silver at The Palace till she fell?
         Where's mad Miss Alice, who ate from garbage cans?
         Where's snuffdipping Lucy, who played us 'chunes'
    on her guitar? Where's Hattie? Where's
    Melissabelle?
         Let vanished rooms, let dead streets tell….

The sequence is unsentimental and compassionate. It has a great sense of timing, and utilizes this fully as a poetic resource—Hayden is far too good a poet to rely solely on images to do the poem's work. His rhythmic sense is stronger, and more appealing, in any case, and his use of syntax superb. (pp. 87-8)