Title: ADORATION OF THE GOLDEN CALF
Author: Richard Stull
Publisher: The Groundwater Press, New York

Poor piercing eloquence wasted on the rich: Rich Stull's paraphrase of Spenser has a mock poignant ring for his Adoration of the Golden Calf. In many ways this chapbook collection is an address to the raw rich or rich indifference of the City, a floating palace of a place rather like Manhattan. The personality of the writing is at once satiric, chronic, and emblematic; it represents itself as a personal artifice elegizing in the face of the massively artificial. Its tone-"How can we hope to master our city's/ fluent terms?"-is of a language no longer at faith with itself, which Stull confronts and transforms by elevating the cliché to a near-pastoral sense of loss: at least that is the feeling sense of these poems. Their intellectual sense is guided, as we say when really looking for another word, by humor. A piercing eloquence, yes, but in no way poor.

Stanley Plumly