Her [Davidman's] first book is a big one--more than 80 pages heavily packed with rhymed and unrhymed verse and a great deal of promise.  Its vigor and profusion are admirable, but nevertheless I feel disappointed; I had expected a better book. 

. . . . 

The promise for the future of Miss Davidman as a poet lies in the affirmative state of her subconscious as portrayed in two fashionable but undistinguished poems, Prayer against Barrenness and Prayer against Indifference.   These reveal the necessary inward desire for "poetic" progress, so that "surely I shall feel words thicken upon my tongue"--a very healthy sign if combined with intense discipline.  But Miss Davidman has not yet learned to work.  And politics, I might say at this point, is distracting to work.  A poet's politics must come out of his poetry, and too much of Miss Davidman's poetry comes out of her politics.  Poets are leaders and not camp followers.  A preconceived notion, the unconscious drive to conform to a set series of ideas must necessarily hang a cloud in the doorway of what is at best a delicate vision.

. . . . 

. . . If I have judged this book on standards other than usually applied to first books, it is that the time is late, the archives are cluttered with rubbish and stammering minds, and that performance, not promise, is now expected from the young.