SOURCE: "Collisions in Poetry," The Hudson Review, Vol. XL, No. 4, Winter 1988, pp. 677-85.

In the following review, McDowell praises the historical vision and philosophical breadth of Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, and he suggests that the seriousness of this book dwarves the works of many other contemporary poets.

Nearing the end of his life, Albert Einstein answered a question he had wrestled with all his life: Does God exist? Einstein concluded that God did exist, but did not really care about us. Peter Viereck's God, in his epic cycle, Archer in the Marrow, resembles Einstein's deity.

Woven into the texture of this book is a tremendous historical awareness, apt irony, and a rhythmic facility seldom encountered in contemporary poetry. The ghosts behind the rhetoric and sensibility include Beckett, Calvino, the mirthful Byron, and the Son's unnamed, adopted brother, Nietzsche. In addition, Viereck imposes the Yeatsian circular...