HAYDEN CARRUTH wrote of his friend, the poet, peace campaigner and Christian Denise Levertov, that she "keeps her mind on the reality of imaginative process. She rarely veers into mystical utterance for its own sake." Carruth considers himself a very down-to-earth poet, suspicious of the vatic or prophetic. He is sometimes pigeonholed as a nature poet, which he does not like either, although he conveys the strongest sense of the real outdoors of any American poet since Frost, from whom his anecdotal pentameter monologues (such as "Regarding Chainsaws", "Marvin McCabe" and "John Dryden") ultima...
