Mystical, witty, iconoclastic, erudite, sensual, harrowing and funny, he is also the unlikeliest combination of energies to inhabit a single sensibility. Indeed, in many of his previous books, these energies occasionally seem more at war than in concert, despite the many good poems in them. But here, in Night Flight, his latest of several dozen books, he seems to have journeyed to Robert Johnsons crossroads and come back blessed, because everything, or very nearly everything, works: the surreal, the absurd, the elegiac and the mystical combining in what is nothing short of a ravishing book.