 A number of critics have received the volume positively.Helen Vendler, for example, labeled it "One of the few unforgettable single volumes published in English since the modernist era" and later as "one of the crucial poetic intervention of the twentieth century".Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote, "I had the uncanny feeling, reading these poems, of listening to the thing itself, the actual substance of historical agony and dissolution, the tragedy of a people in a place