SOURCE: "Viereck's Puppets," The New Leader, Vol. LXXXI, No. 9, August 10-24, 1998, pp. 12-13.

In the following review, Pettingell calls Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938 "a versatile and entertaining book" and suggests that the poetry in this volume represents the culmination of Viereck's career.

For almost 60 years the indefatigable Peter Viereck has honed his wit and offered shrewd cultural judgments in spirited formal verse. Born in the same decade as Dylan Thomas and Robert Lowell, Viereck has lived through the era of neometaphysical poetry bristling with Donne-ish puns and Audenesque prosodie pyrotechnics, then that of Minimalist blank verse and plain speaking, and into the current return to Romantic expansiveness. His declared last collection, Tide and Continuities: Last and First Poems 1995-1938 is introduced by the late Joseph Brodsky in an appropriately poetic Foreword.

 An introduction to a book
of poetry must have a look
of poetry...