“One trusts this writing because, though far from being unmoved by what it sees, it is dispassionate and steady in its gaze, always true to the materials it interprets. This is as much so of the poems in which the speaker is studying himself, his own emotions, as it is of the poems studying our history…This is a true book by a true writer.”
—David Ferry
“Moolten’s language is deceptively simple but run through with a shining filament of metaphor. I don’t mean that the poems are straitjacketed into conventional extended metaphor, but rather that the figures created are touched into life as a candle touches dark wicks into brightness, fading, then flaring anew. There is almost a fugal quality in the working of metaphor here, the pattern of changing recurrence…these are poems that ignite and go on burning.”
