SOURCE: "A Great Poem?" Salmagundi, Vol. 80, Fall 1988, pp. 216-26.

In the following review, Edmundson argues that despite the epic ambitions of Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles, the work does not represent a conceptual or poetic advance.

Imagine a poem of epic length in which the main characters include Father, Son, You, Dionysus, Venus, Eve, Mary Magdalen and a Lungfish, mankind's amphibious ancestor. The poem's scope encompasses all of human time, from its first syllable to its apocalyptically re-engendering last. Though the work is provided with stage directions, its spatial range is not measurable. It takes place simultaneously in the cosmic mytho-sphere and in the mind of a composite version of Man. The author's high argument concerns the true path to self-overcoming, which he conceives as a process by which mankind learns to give up on ersatz versions of transcendence and exult in what we might call...