SOURCE: Tejada, Roberto. Review of Eroding Witness, by Nathaniel Mackey.Sulfur: A Literary Tri-Quarterly of the Whole Art 10 (fall 1987): 177-83.

In the following review, Tejada reviews Mackey's Eroding Witness.

While most of his contemporaries enjoy the poetic climate which sanctions a writing immersed in the disorders of its own medium, Eroding Witness, Nathaniel Mackey's first sizable collection of poetry, asserts the distinct work of a poet free from the dominant strategies of current avant-garde practice. As a result—perhaps also because it was published as part of the National Poetry Series over two years ago?—I suspect this book has slipped by readers whom it would otherwise interest.

You might expect this from a tame collection of single poems but Eroding Witness is spoken in both an immediate & sustained voice and the assembly bares Mackey's sensibility to the notion of a book as both a congruent and overlapping...