For Roethke, the notion of the minimal had many aspects: the short-lined, tightly metered couplets and quatrains …; the subject matter of the brilliant greenhouse poems in The Lost Son, where the poet's close attention to "the little sleepers" awakens his sense so violently that he can pass through the greenhouse and notice how "my knees made little winds underneath / Where the weeds slept"; and the minimal philosophy of fear, ennui, and emptiness in such late poems as "The Thing" and "In a Dark Time." (pp. 732-33)

For Stafford, the minimal becomes primarily a matter of subject, and as the title of Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People announces, the poet looks for simplification through a version of a most fundamental Romantic theme: uncorrupted and primitive Nature as a wellspring of wisdom and love. This is no new theme for Stafford; in fact, his insistent returns to this idea have been almost pathological. (p. 733)

Stafford's dogged faith in the teaching power of Nature has been matched by his persistent demand for a plain-spoken poetry—even, at times, a bardic poetry—and in this respect he is more like Whitman than like any other American Romantic. While stylistic comparisons of Stafford and Whitman could not be carried very far, there are certain points in Things That Happen where the Gray Poet's rolling voice of the open road cannot be missed. (pp. 733-34)

Stafford must abandon man in order to see him again. In a way Stafford's landscape is full of people but not in the usual sense. Rather the people are there as spirits invited to renew themselves at the altar of Nature. These poems are written for those not present in the poems. "An Offering," the last piece in Things That Happen, addresses beautifully just this notion of Nature as renewing force. (p. 734)

Whitman spent his entire career rewriting a single volume of poems, and I have mentioned already the unity that Stafford's canon exhibits. Such persistency and constancy can be the marks of a major poet but can also carry dangers, and these two poets share flaws as well as strengths: recurrent ideas can become repetitive poems, and plain-speaking can become flat poetry. The first of these potential weaknesses threatens Things That Happen most often, and Stafford may be countering the problem of repetitiveness when he emphasizes the omnipresence of the natural world's power…. But still the poet must give new words to the old ideas, and by the time we reach the title poem at mid-volume, we feel we have already been there. In short, Stafford's collection may have too much unity for its own good, so that respectable poems pale beside finer poems on the same subject.

Stafford is willing to have his language collapse at times as the price paid for building a voice virtually ungirded by poetic gestures. When this voice is clear and fresh, the result is marvelous…. But there are times when freshness departs from Stafford's writing, and we are left only with the clarity of easy statements. There is a note in Stafford's natural songs which tends toward the sentimental …, and another note which sings clichéd philosophies…. (pp. 735-36)

Things That Happen has fine moments, but it shows Stafford eliminating too many of his strengths in singleminded pursuit of his vision of the natural world. Empty lands have always been his subject, but so have people, and many of his finest poems in earlier volumes have brought individuals to life with precise, loving detail. A poem late in Things That Happen concludes, "What disregards people does people good," but while Stafford often convinces us of this truth as we read his new collection, there are times when we would wish people back into this landscape—people who would regard us, and whom we would regard, in ways that would also do us good. (p. 736)