His poems mark time. Personal and historic anniversaries and other landmark passages (weddings, deaths, births, diurnal and nocturnal motions, the months—his collection Heart Island, for instance, takes as its backbone 12 poems apostrophizing each of the months of the zodiac—the seasons, ‘sacred’ thresholds of all sorts) provide the occasion for poetic musings that, though they may begin with noting or honoring a pattern in nature or human behavior, always move the reader into unexpected and provocative territory.” — Chronicle of Higher Education