Perry's work, by contrast, made fewer accommodations to the reader. The sound was always beguiling, but the sense was intricate and sometimes elusive. His poems did not lay out every step the reader must take but demanded his active collaboration in making connections, especially in thinking through the full associations of his metaphors and images. This deliberate ambiguity makes Denizens a difficult book to read, especially for the first time. Many readers, I suspect, will give up on certain poems, feeling they cannot follow their full meaning.
Ambiguity is a dangerous technique in poetry.
When it works it can create mysterious and haunting poems. When, more often, it fails it results in pretense and obscurity. Denizens had its share of both outcomes, but its successes more than compensated for its failures. Finally, there was an astonishing sense of sensual excitement in reading Denizens . One had to go back to Stevens to find another poet so fascinated with the gaudy and the exotic.