Among modern Canadian writers David McFadden, poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist, is one of the most adept at the exposition of the heroic and ironic elements of commonplace human experience. As might be expected of a writer who finds profundity in small things, his more distant literary antecedents are romantic: his favorite poet is William Blake, and he has been an enthusiastic reader of Walt Whitman; he follows in the footsteps of such twentieth-century disciples of Blake and Whitman as William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. His Canadian literary associations have included the West Coast Tish writers who introduced projectivist and other postmodern American literary movements to Canada. In spite of his admiration for American literary traditions, he is very consciously a Canadian writer and has tried to bridge the gap between a new localism and a broader sense of nationalism--through both his widely...