The materials here are fascinating, and the poem is full of comedy, wit and high spirits. I love “a palace on rails, with bathrooms that fold away,” and there are elegant phrases like “points in the blank of the Never-Never.” My chief criticism is that meter and rhyme ought to seem to happen accidentally as the argument flows. Here the meter is often Procrustean, as in the jammed line “crates, dropped chuteless, sprang food-package leaks,” and though it is good fun to rhyme “outback,” “stout back,” and “shout back,” one feels that it’s rhyme and not the flow of content that’s in control.
~Richard Wilbur
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