Karen Alexander comments on Lax's 1985 "Dark Earth Bright Sky", in which just those four words are repeated in different permutations: "We could not be more familiar with the simple contrasting elements in this poem, but we often allow the clutter of our lives to obscure our awareness of them. Lax meditates upon them and presents them anew… This is truly essential poetry, poetry with its roots deep in the universal foundation of the human consciousness". And Ryo Yamaguchi, in drawing a parallel between Lax's poetry and the minimalist procedures in the art of Donald Judd and in the music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich, also acknowledges the overlap into spirituality characteristic of the latter two.