Retallack, appreciating a Stein poem, notes: "There is pleasure in this elegantly textured linguistic lunch"
"crisp textures"
"gentle phonemic transformations"
"the poignancy of language cut of from circumstance"
"fleeting but vivid images"
"full of glimpsed significations, but also studded with opacities confronting the reader primarily with tactile (phonemic or graphic) qualities"
"we are being returned to words as objects in the process of becoming"
one becomes "caught up in the sheer vitality of language; not needing to worry about or defend its sense because [one is] so in touch with its sensations"
we can appreciate poets who "let us, with them, experience language, not as a reflection or description of reality, but as a reality itself in which we move, jump, hum"