Collections like Letters to Live Poets , Lauds and Plaints and Odes and Days reveal a writer attentive to the sweep and singularity of daily experience, a poet whose eloquence is never far from praise, and a man for whom art is not an addition to life but an index of life itself. Re-reading Beaver, one finds a poet whose quest for imaginative vitality goes by way of both American and European verse. While Beaver pitches his voice higher in odes and lower in conversational letters, these same tensions are found, reset, in each new book. They are part of what moves him to write new poems and part of what attracts us to read them.
Great poems speak in a voice that is wholly at ease with all their author's craft.
It is as though prosody and rhetoric have passed from the poet's mind to live in his or her breath and fingers. We sense this when reading poets of tremendous compression, like Montale, as well as poets like Whitman who like to let a line go wandering for a while. One could say much the same of 'Lady made for love', 'Brenda's Mandela', and perhaps two or three others in this new collection. There are readers who prefer a rough to a smooth finish, and they number among Beaver's most devoted admirers. Yet no one will tolerate clumsiness in a poet.