News at Eleven: [Ammiel] Alcalay, who is now in his late

fifties, comes from New England, and he hung around in Boston, where he seems to have been strongly influenced by the odd mixture of Beat hipness and poetic altitude that marks the work of the underappreciated John Wieners. In a way, the young Alcalay sounds more like a member of a previous generation. He listens to jazz, not rock, to Archie Shepp, not Janis Joplin.

"neither wit nor gold" demands from its reader a good ear for style and a sophisticated ability to jockey between the past and the present. The title poem stands at the book's threshold, and its archaic diction, a riff on the 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet's riff on the Book of Matthew, places you in a historical no-man's land:

from Tablet: Young at Heart

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