SOURCE: Jenkins, Paul. “American Poetry, 1987.” Massachusetts Review 29, no. 1 (spring 1988): 97–135.

In the following excerpt, Jenkins comments on the ubiquitous references to angels in recent American poetry and offers a generally positive review of The Veil.

Confronted with 130-odd new books of poetry received by MR in 1987, I started out looking for nothing more particular than poems that excited me. Gradually it began to sink in: I was seeing angels, everywhere. In books I liked just as often as in ho-hum ones. Near the end I began to keep count. Of the final eighteen volumes I read, saved for last for no reason but pure chance, fully fourteen contained one or more angels.

Why angels? The trickledown into poetry of the unworldly Reagan years? A reinvasion of beings supplanted in recent decades by extraterrestrials and Cabbage Patch dolls? Or simply the publication of so many new translations of the Duino...