Owens's style is direct, unadorned, and consists of simple sentence, followed by a comma, then one clause and another and another . . . . There is absolutely no pretentiousness in his "manner of speaking" (to borrow the expression from the title of a long-termcolumn in the Saturday Review by the late John Ciardi), its directness, and the stinging acuity of its observations.

Almost all of his poems are tight, with few words wasted and with conscious attention to teh way in which the poem moves down the page.

I like the tonal range of Owens's work, from sheer violence and fear, to the gentle and moving.

In many ways, this is an "event book," by which I mean a collection whose poems ring so true that they seem to be definitive of place and of the times with which they deal.