News at Eleven: Most critics avoid overt self-reference;

[Maureen] McLane recognizes that we all read with baggage. She reports on that baggage, miraculously without the cloistered narcissism typical of memoir. It's part of this book's strength, and its broad appeal, that McLane is willing to get personal while also tossing off niftily worded assessments of poems. The modernist Moore "has no heirs," McLane writes. "She has several epigones but their detail-laden lacquered ships for me don't float."

from The New York Times: Under the Influence

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