Delany 56: "In his long poem The Alphabet [...] in the S-section, 'Skies' [...] Ron Silliman gives us the detritus of many days' looking at the sky--of going out an writing at least a sentence a day about it. The result? A sensuous, sumptuous, and remarkably analytical cascade of perceptions, focused on one great natural field. Another thing we turn to today's task-oriented poetry for is the performance of those language undertakings that we prose writers are just too lazy, or, yes, too insensitive, to try."