The experience of reading Sleepers Joining Hands … is a bit like slogging your way through a violent storm.

The book begins in deceptive calm, with "Six Winter Privacy Poems."… Bly's central theme, beautifully rendered: the duality of inner and outer worlds, the deep duality of a consciousness often conflicted but existing here in a momentary state of peaceful coexistence. It's the American haiku, fully and quietly accomplished…. [However,] the final, frenetic Whitmanesque catalogue of wildly various identifications [in "An Extra Joyful Chorus for Those Who Have Read This Far"] should give you some idea of the bumpy ground Bly travels in Sleepers Joining Hands.

Bly's troubled yearning to achieve the condition of a Whitman most shows in passages of "The Night Journey in the Cooking Pot."… Whitman's influence is everywhere…. Whitman was not, so far as I can recall, ever ashamed sitting on the edge of his bed...