Stephen Yenser's
The Fire in All Things
"It is the energy of form consciously invoked-reversal, reccurence, closure-which is the fire in
all Mr. Yenser's things. No poem in his significantly plotted book can escape
the consumption (the consummation) of second thoughts, a discipline of
patterning undergone, rarely paraded. Hence ever so many reservations wittily
lodged about life's likelihoods, for most of the poems call into question the
expected success of bodies, and weathers, travels and passions. Exceptional is
the grandest making, `Vertumnal,' a luminous tribute to another life,
character explored as searchingly as in Robinson or Frost, though its surfaces
and seams are Yenser's own, igneous with a `loved philology.' The poet is
learned as well as knowing, arrant as well as scrupulous, and for all the
topiary and all the charm, you can read straight through this book with the
gaining discovery that it is one text, a single utterance of realization-the
poem's, the poet's, yours."
-Richard Howard
The Fire in All Things