review of two books on George Oppen--

"For this reason, as Nicholls demonstrates, Oppen's poems rarely contain philosophical arguments, just as they rarely contain political arguments. The wonder of existence is registered not only in what Oppen's poems say--

In the small beauty of the forest
The wild deer bedding down--
That they are there!

--but in their manner of saying: rather than providing the evidence of completed thought, the poems disclose the process of thinking as it happens. Nicholls is more interested in Oppen as a thinker than as a poet, but he allows Oppen to be everything that he was, refusing--like Oppen himself--to ask poetry to shoulder responsibilities it cannot bear..."

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