Smooth Side, Rough Side

A poet who takes as much from the New York School as from the Metaphysicals, Arthur Vogelsang's images bespeak both imagination and intellect, his forms equal parts carpentry and classical piano, his aesthetic as whimsical as it is political. His "good, nasty poems evoke the America of Norman Rockwell," says John Ashbery, "as Hieronymus Bosch might have painted it," though Vogelsang at second or third glance is never as ironic or surreal as on first read. His "absolutely familiar voice," as one reviewer calls it, disarms amid tough syntax and surprising juxtapositions, and that same reviewer, Gerald Stern, in tracking the mixed polar qualities of Vogelsang's work, says "by direction and by indirection he creates a verbal framework, a poetic tablet, the way a poet can, and if he's brave enough, does."-The Poetry Foundation