Volume 41, Number 17 · October 20, 1994
Barely Sighted Lives
By Brad Leithauser
New Things Come into the World
by Peter Kane Dufault
Lindisfarne, 184 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Invention of the Zero
by Richard Kenney
Knopf, 158 pp., $20.00
I'm tempted to call Peter Kane Dufault a 'little-known poet'—even if nowadays that's something of a redundancy, like 'commercial athletics' or 'formulaic top 40.' He's someone who doesn't appear in most anthologies, and whose name is likely to raise a fuzzy look of semirecognition when dropped among contemporary poets. He doesn't seem to teach anywhere, and one senses, both in his life and in his poems, an impatience with the 'poetry scene' (an impatience extending, I'm afraid, to the niceties of his own books, which harbor more than their share of typos). His most recent collection, New Things Come into the World, is his fourth. The other three—Angel of Accidence (1954), For Some Stringed Instrument (1957), and On Balance (1978)—are out of print. None of the four has provided many details about the author's life or the poem's chronologies. But my guess is that he has been steadily writing verse for something like half a century.
Review, 3865 words
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