So skillful in his mild modernism …, so various in his errant annotations is Meredith [in Hazard, the Painter] that we do not know, even at the end, what hit us—a caress of ground glass and very finely honed feathery blades, most likely, so that hits just aren't in it. Mortality and the dimming senses are the apparent pretext of these ruminations…. But the real subject is ressentiment, even anger, and the real object throughout is America the Imperial, these States in their warring "decline" viewed from a perspective which has only darkened since Emerson unbosomed himself to his journal, 1847…. Meredith doesn't want to be a prophet, only an artist, a messenger, an angel maybe. But the observation, the organic detail plucked out and brooded upon until it yields up its sense, its significance—that is Emersonian (the ground-juniper), and it is Meredithian too:

        Near the big spruce, on the path that goes
        to the compost heap, broken members
        of a blue-jay have been assembled
        as if to determine the cause of
        a crash without survivors.
                          Walking
        with Hazard, the cat does not observe
        them. The cat will be disassembled
        in his own time by underground technicians.
        At this point Hazard's thought turns chicken.
        It is the first warm May day, the rich
        black compost heap is full of promise.

Promise! The decline which is the asseveration of mortality in a moribund democracy holds like a freeze in this little novel until winter sets in, the real freeze, and Hazard sets out again. And the book ends there, in a wonderful epitome of the two poets who have meant the most to Meredith's making, Frost and Auden—Frost for precisely that "beautiful condensation" not to be formed by our affluent drecky lives, Auden for the recognition of sacred sites, a commitment to Earth as transcendence…. I guess Hazard couldn't exist without Berryman's Henry, without Lowell's History, yet how much less posturing in this man—how much less is more! Maybe there is posturing ("devious in ways I still like better than plainspokenness" is Meredith's vaunt), but it is so attractive, so ingratiating that it seems, merely, how meaning turns in the mind's mouth, enjambment a way of walking, figuration a dead reckoning. I would not make overweening claims for the little suite which is mostly spoken under the breath, from a procumbent posture as it were, but the life is in it, unreconciled surds of identity, and I am grateful for the record of what it has been like, existing—if not exacting—in my hazardous time, too. (pp. 209-11)