For Roethke, the notion of the minimal had many aspects: the short-lined, tightly metered couplets and quatrains …; the subject matter of the brilliant greenhouse poems in The Lost Son, where the poet's close attention to "the little sleepers" awakens his sense so violently that he can pass through the greenhouse and notice how "my knees made little winds underneath / Where the weeds slept"; and the minimal philosophy of fear, ennui, and emptiness in such late poems as "The Thing" and "In a Dark Time." (pp. 732-33)

For Stafford, the minimal becomes primarily a matter of subject, and as the title of Things That Happen Where There Aren't Any People announces, the poet looks for simplification through a version of a most fundamental Romantic theme: uncorrupted and primitive Nature as a wellspring of wisdom and love. This is no new theme for Stafford; in fact, his insistent returns to...