The first four parts of Winter of the Luna Moth demonstrate the truth of the adage, "one touch of nature makes the whole world kin." The similarity between fish, birds, bats, pigs, insects, etc., and human beings with respect to alimentation, reproduction, growth, and death is used to transfer human values and attributes to the world of our finned, furred, feathered, and scaled partners in life on the planet. Such a transfer possesses two poetical advantages. It enables the poet to support his belief in the one-ness of all life, however ugly or beautiful; and it provides him with a fresh vocabulary and an original set of images with which to adorn his work.

The poet's world is the familiar one of the disillusioned idealist—a world in which beauty and nobility are threatened or ruined by the greed of predators, but the expression is anything but familiar...