Babette Deutsch has always impressed me as being a fine painter in words, capable of arresting an image in the mind's eye. Not that she is devoid of ideas. On the contrary. But that, with minor exceptions (as in "Three Views of Mount Rainier," which is a bit nonsensical and childish with its image of the snowy mountain as a giant ice cream for God), she is able to confront the mind with a dimensional, chromatic picture that is an idea in itself, or better still, that evokes a series of ideas in pretty much the same way that a Japanese landscape unfolds its possibilities….

Her Collected Poems, 1919–1962, covers, from the standpoint of years, the better part of a lifetime, and extends to the reader who himself has survived those years the comfort of knowing that a sensitive, lively intelligence found some grace in them. Her poetic forms...