Voznesensky is widely traveled and widely acquainted…. His range and variety are amazing; but a constant theme is that of elusiveness within the chosen subject, the feeling of something known to be there which can not be caught. "I long not for art—I choke on my craving for reality" (from the title poem [of Nostalgia for the Present]), almost as if sometimes, like Marianne Moore sometimes, he actually disliked poetry. And there is something, whether in his frequent colloquialisms, or diffuse composition, or the rhyming stanzas, that resists transformation into any final expression as poetry in English…. Sometimes, again, as in "Winter at the Track," I find the Russian fancy just too fantastic for this literal and visual mind. This volume also has one long narrative poem, "Story Under Full Sail."… [A] poem full of brilliant pieces, which, however, have to have notes and commentary before they...