Back of a Vast

These poems disclose a poet's rich relationship to the natural world by stripping away by letting a raw objectivist lyric scrape off any rhetorical surface to discover the details beneath. This happens in almost every line every phrase-so much so that finally his individual words seem to do it by themselves. The result is that /nature/ here ticks and clicks as though it were trying to find a halfway-house language between itself and the writer. Illusion of course the trick of poetry and Mark Goodwin is the magician. (Tim Allen)