There is very little surface to the poems. They are frank, chatty, unpretentious. We come to care about his life, and he leaves us with few illusions about that life. We are made aware of his intellectual stamina without its being brought to bear on the poems themselves. If there is a depth it is one of comfortable wisdom rather than brainy verve.
Various speakers interpolate the warmhearted motion of the poems.
The poems have a Whitmanlike expansiveness of line and focus. The wind blew it halfway across the street Or from one edge of the table to another. It's not alive. This hysterical exchange seems to contain the very electrical impulse the cynic within it proposes as a reductive explanation for life. This humor is common to the collection, but there is a gravity and sadness underneath the humor.