Part historical epic, part research paper, part tour de force, Daniel Hoffman's [Brotherly Love] is first and foremost a curiosity. It's not so strange that he incorporates the "found poetry" of letters, treaties, Indian pictographs and paintings into his narrative history of the founding of Pennsylvania. The real shock is Hoffman's total rejection of the modern style—the voice that has come down to us from Eliot and Auden—in favor of what might be called American classicism. It is the diction rather than the meter that continually fascinates, even more than the story—which is of the destruction of the Lenni Lenape Indians in the name of the American utopia. What is one to make of a poet who addresses Whitman, Poe and Brockden Brown: "Wait! I'd join you, seers of the soul's exile!" and then invokes Clio: "Ah, Muse of sterner songs, frown not upon my...