SOURCE: A review of In Defense of the Earth, in New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 4, Winter 1956-1957, pp. 409-11.

In this review of In Defense of the Earth, Creeley sees Rexroth as moving toward more readable poems.

In Defense of the Earth is the first more or less substantial collection of Kenneth Rexroth's poems since the publication of his The Dragon And The Unicorn. The latter was a long philosophical travel-poem, so that the book I am reviewing more literally goes back to The Signature Of All Things (1949), and is (as that book was) an accumulation of poems and translations of varying length and determination.

Many of these poems deal with similar locations and events, seeking over and over again for the changing forms of an unchanging significance in stars, insects, mountains and daughters. They do not of course try to answer, "Why am I here?" "Why...