Hayden is a poet of many voices, using varieties of ironic black folk speech, and a spare, ebullient poetic diction, to grip and chill his readers. He draws characters of stark vividness as he transmutes cardinal points and commonplaces of history into dramatic action and symbol.

The slender, potent American Journal is well named. For here we peruse, at close range, portions of America's visible (public, documented) and—to use Octavio Paz's term—"invisible history." We ascend "The Point" at Stonington, Connecticut, and in the brilliant air, alive with wild swans and terns, we salute the revolutionaries who repelled the British there: "we are for an instant held in shining / like memories in the mind of God."

The Afro-American past is of special concern here. In "A Letter From Phillis Wheatley," Hayden uses understatement to reveal what historians have recently discovered: that Phillis, the 18th-century slave poet, viewed slavery and prejudice with horror, wonder, and well-guarded humor….

The title poem is a tour de force framed as the jottings of an otherworldly visitor reporting on the American people during the bicentennial. The visitor, in earthling disguise, finds Americans noisy, vain, wasteful, and cruel worshippers of machines; yet the "charming savages enlightened primitives brash / new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy" are attractively vigorous and ingenious. (p. G6)

The most compelling section of this book is the sequence of poems ironically called "Elegies For Paradise Valley," (named for a tough Detroit neighborhood of yesteryear), a place vividly recalled from the poet's boyhood, and captured in terse, sometimes gritty language…. (pp. G6-G7)

American Journal, by Hayden the "poet of perfect pitch," is a book of unforgettable images of America and her people, a prayerful report from one of our most hauntingly accurate, and yet hopeful, recorders. (p. G7)