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pp. 92, “Introduction Doug Underhill’s collection of verse, Only The Salt, is divided into three parts, Prose Poems, Human Nature, and Natural World. The last two of these, very good of their kind, draw their sources from common traditional attitudes and take their shapes from the forms of older poems. They testify to the continuily value and relevance of the forms and content in which they are couched. Had they made up the entire volume, it would have been a worthy continuation of indigenous tradition, always uplifting and occasionally moving in its moments of individual perception. There is always room in a book for poems like “Pumpkin Ripeners”, “In Pumpkin-Grinner Art”, “Only The Salt”, “Dandelion”, “Relics Of A Season”, “The Spawn”, “Crows”, “It Is The Machine” and “Snowflakes”. But if you want in poetry what John Milton called “the precious life and blood of a master spirit”, read Underhill’s prose poems. In these – nearly every one a wonder of its kind – there is none of finding a form, and attitude, and a topic, and using energy to stick to these. What each prose poem represents is a naked wrestling match between a poet-Jacob and the power of his imagination challenged by the very presence of his angel-object. These poems are such pure radiations of the intensity of mind over matter that I hesitate to pick out any one of them as a signal example. – Dr Fred Cogswell”