The Case For Daryl Hine

Bill Coyle makes it ("one of the most gifted poets alive")—but not without caveats:

Too many times, I have had the experience of recommending Hine’s work to readers essentially in tune with his esthetic, only to have them report back that they find him remote, cold, mandarin to the point of unreadability. In distinguishing between those poems of his that contain an embarrassment of riches and those that are so rich as to be indigestible, then, I’m not so much trying to establish a Hine canon as assure new readers that such distinctions can profitably be made.

Read the rest of Coyle's excellent essay here.