Mr. Hoffman's poetry [in An Armada of Thirty Whales] is extremely detailed in its observation of nature, and his clams and snails and pears and whales yield intricate parables by being so closely inspected. Perhaps not sentimentality so much as a diffidence about it, or fear of it, weakens so many of these poems just at the ending; his "Icarus, Icarus" moves with a goodly competence down to "what ecstasy of pride it was that shook/you loose from all that beeswax and those quills,/O how you soared," then drags in what I feel to be a plain irrelevance: "that instant before Breughel/showed human eyes unseeing at your fall." This or a similar fault diminished my pleasure in several other poems also, but I found one, "That the pear delights me now," whose ritual nature allows of a quiet, anticipated close, and which seems strong and...