*In her review of Points for a Compass Rose in Harper's Magazine, Annie Dillard wrote:

"We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls 'the nerve for excellence.' He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience."

"... Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note-taker's [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread -- any thread -- follow it, and, lo, it traces a pattern. ... you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they 'expressions': they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect."