The Heisenberg Variations

Bricuth is a fully formed poet, already battling for strength against a formidable triple composite precusor of Yeats, Stevens, and Hart Crane. Like his precursors he is a romantic expressionist, violently within the tradition, and his deepest affinities are with Crane and with Faulkner (whose early verse was also in Crane's shadow). As a southern poet, Bricuth recalls aspects of Poe (as Crane did), and like the midwesterner Crane, he has stylistic affinities with the fierce rhetoric of Tate and Warren. The Heisenberg Variations, despite the title's link with a theme of metaphysical indeterminacy, continuously dares an overdetermined and incantatory rhetoric, gaining thereby an immediacy of verbal power that goes back to the fountainheads of high romantic incantation, Shelley and Whitman. The risk, and sometimes the loss, for Bricuth is that he challenges comparisons all but impossible to sustain... Bricuth's [is] a very difficult poetry, as Crane's before him was startlingly difficult. Bricuth's best poems need endless rereadings and demand the exuberant study that an informed reader learns he or she must bring to a visionary poetry, at its most intense and complex levels of meaning... The Heisenberg Variations will be seen, someday, as the advent of a crucial voice and a central poetic career, worthy of its origins in Hart Crane and his fellow poets.