The prose criticism that Sorrentino has published in little magazines shows his power of making lucid distinctions. In poetry [as evidenced in The Darkness Surrounds Us] he still sounds too much like those from whom he has learned, especially Creeley, but what happens to him happens to him, indubitably, and he uses Creeley's mode with such virtuosity that one feels he is doing so as a temporary expedient, as a man may borrow another's good saw until he has one as excellent, and yet be cutting wood that is his own. He has moral force, a kind of angry pride as if he had been much hurt but never downed, and a notable intelligence. That these qualities make themselves so felt even though formally he has not yet achieved his own variation on the ground base, seems to me a measure of how much one may expect from...