PositiveThe Arts FuseHowdie-Skelp is also impressively varied and full of technical fireworks, raucous wit, bumper-cars of non-sequiturs, a grand collision of images and ideas, but I have to say I like the earlier book better: there are simply more individual poems a careful reader of poetry wants to return to ... The new book is full of tours de force ... There will be plenty of surprises along the way, but we can always depend on Muldoon to \'make it new.\'
Robert Hass
RaveThe Arts FuseSummer Snow reminds us, as [Hass] nears 80, of his boundless energy, of the range of his wandering mind, and the subtlety of his methods ... There’s a lot happening in this book, some of it more memorable than the rest ... Can his poems sometimes sound like little more than charming, educated monologues by a favorite professor, with clever titles like The Sixth Sheik’s Sheep’s Sick? Yes. And when political, are his Left Coast opinions sometimes painfully obvious? Yes ... But these hesitations are quibbles. Poem after poem in this rich collection gives us lyrical pleasure and hard-earned human insight.
