FEELING ANXIOUS and hungering to be in a place--sleep--where you can't be, is a metaphor for American restlessness, for all our desires for place and roots. It is a central irony of the poem that in order to achieve the American--or any other kind of--dream, you must be asleep, which these displaced lowans who come to California aren't exactly:

...Living here was too much what they/thought it would be. The sequences of perfect days were unavoidably what they'd come for. They should be making/more of what was there and possible at any hour in that clean air. With all those possibilities aligned for them along the tracks and poles and wires/they should be somewhere else since where they were was/old already with their being there.

Hardly any of the 2,000 or so lines of the work seem to regard the world outside this uneasiness.

Knowledge of our displacement, knowledge of death--these are consciousness for McMichael, and what consciousness does is worry and plan, though it hungers like the wren to say "Here I am," to make a place out of sleep or to make "Pasadena" or a house like a nest, to make love. This is a long American poem remarkable in that it stays completely in the world of ordinary consciousness, of history and fact and daily life. It does not wander into myth, the dark of nature, or sexuality, fun as that might be to read. The passage about lovemaking is about sex manuals--technics--which is just another symptom of anxiety and planning ahead. These too are "as free of people as a garden is, or as a plan."

In the first book-length American poem, Walt Whiman, with a great sense of how comic the idea was, made love to all of us, to the whole future. We could, he said, make the future now with our imaginations--like the man in the TV ad says today. McMichael does the opposite. To him, the present is always future. Partly he sees this as the human condition (we are displaced; we do have to plan) and partly as an economic one, with capitalism as the engine which continually displaces the present. It exists in terms of consumption only, what is being used and passing out of our hands. The present is what is being eaten.

There may be another source for this vision. McMichael belongs to the generation of writers, now about 40, who grew up in the social and economic expansion of the postwar years. It was probably most intense in California. There, the young watched the planning and the confidence and the technical inventiveness turn, with callousness and efficiency and fury, on Vietnam. That war had no people in the plan, and as one Administration with a plan to win the war was replaced by an Administration with a plan to end the war, the suffering seemed to go on forever. So a generation of American writers has come to look at the central mechanics of American life with a deep, stunned, curious detachment.

Now we have yet another California President with yet another set of plans--including, it would seem, the intensification of civil war in Central America, the sacrifice of the elderly and the marginally employed to provide a shield against uncertainties in the market, and the export of adulterated foodstuffs to the underdeveloped world. The detachment of Four Good Things, its precision and meditative quiet, are new especially powerful, with the power art sometimes has of stinging us awake. In the last lines of the poem, as the narrator is falling asleep his wife describes to him an afternoon spent skiing:

The street was ice and hardly wide enough for/two of them at a time, or for a cart,/They felt showy in their bright nylon. /A woman with a bowl looked at them from her door. /Chickens. A covered water trough. She told me/more about the street and then remembered,/what she wasy saying, she said, was that there were/farmers out working in the snow.

After all the turnings, it seems radiant, this glimpse of the fact that there are people in the world.