He uses an elemental vocabulary of violence and physical things without a grotesquerie that might shatter his combination of nightmare and realism. His rhythms are bold, strong, sure, and never totter into prose. His imagination avoids sloppily surrealistic images that might soften his poems. Single poems are often impressive, especially in a sharp and brief focusing on the problem of evil and on some common delusions within human relations. But the accumulated nihilism (well-accumulated when one is only a third into the book) is too often communicated through a gimmicky use of constant reversals and through an attempt within single poems to be progressively more nihilistic. After a few poems, this seems an exhibitionistic game and a flogging of horses that were killed off in the preceding poems.