SOURCE: "Some New Poems by Peter Viereck," Poetry, Vol. 89, No. 5, February 1957, pp. 316-19.

In the following review of The Persimmon Tree, Carruth considers the poetry in this volume an improvement over Viereck's earlier works but confesses that he finds Viereck's poems "painfully hard to read."

Peter Viereck's new poems are very similar in tone and manner to the earlier poems which won him such great popularity, yet there is, I think, a difference. His book, The Persimmon Tree, is divided into a number of sections, and particularly in the one marked "Pastoral" the new poems offer a somewhat gentler flow, an easier tone of voice. To my mind this is an improvement, and I like some of these new poems very much. Viereck manages to bring to the meditative lyric, our supremely popular kind of poem, an individuality of voice and a rather nervous movement which make his...