In a 1994 essay on the restoration of his house in upstate New York, he notes that "nostalgia, if it isn't good for anything else, seems to elicit poetry." Nostalgia (literally, the ache to go home) certainly elicits poetry here, the poems filled with things of an earlier, dowdier American culture: a
darning egg, deviled eggs, glycerin, a hall tree, "prelapsarian school picnics," sugar tongs, and "Walsh's, with its fancy grocery department." In another poet's work, such things might appear in a sticky, contrived spot of time or in a merely ironic bit of kitsch.