SOURCE: A review of The Blue Estuaries, in Hudson Review, Vol. XXII, No. 2, Summer, 1969, pp. 364, 366, 368.

Dickey is an American poet and critic whose verse is surprisingly varied in mood, voice, and theme, often fluctuating between humorous and serious observations on life. In the following excerpt, he asserts that Bogan's careful, spare treatment of language enabled the creation of enlightening poetry in The Blue Estuaries.

The Blue Estuaries reprints the contents of Louise Bogan's Collected Poems of 1953, and adds a dozen poems presumably subsequent to that work. The new poems do not alter Miss Bogan's tone or her concerns: they stress again what the Collected Poems showed us: the spare restraint, the absence of noise and distractions; above all, the desire to present relationships in their most severely essential form. The poem from which the new book's title is taken provides an illustration:

      night

The cold remote islands
And...