“I think he is a visionary poet, by which I mean he is in touch with something tenuous, and that he feels the other voice or the other thing inside him. His virtue is that his geography is common, and he is too studious of his own route to be dithering or magisterial or magical…There is form, diction, subject matter, language, and music, but it is this imprint, this print, that captures us. If I had to give a name to it—for Beckman—I would call it affection. His identity is through affection. That is his print.”

                                               — Gerald Stern, from the introduction