SOURCE: "Homages to Life," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XCIX, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. cii-civ.

The following excerpt is from Faulkner's laudatory review of Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands.

For a good long while Hayden Carruth has been one of our best critics of contemporary American poetry. His reviews, whether appearing in literary quarterlies or major newspapers, have always borne a sense of kinship with his readers. He reads the way an attentive reader would want, with perspicacity and hindsight, as often offering the reader a close-but-no-cigar estimation of the work before him as he might the sense that he, as well as poetry, was seeing something welcome and new. Carruth can be tough, or laudatory, and often both, but he never praises mediocrity.

As a poet himself Carruth is much harder to pin...