Twice the winner of a Governor General's Award, for Poems (1946) and Acis in Oxford, and Other Poems (1959), Robert Finch was in the early years of his publishing career a controversial figure in Canadian poetry; his later books have sparked limited though generally positive critical response. A paraphrase of a line from the early credo "Beauty My Food Fine Care" may offer at least a partial explanation of the controversy his work aroused in the socially and politically aware 1940s intellectual world, for, as that poem has it, Finch's verse does aim to seduce an erudite company. Undeniably conservative in outlook, serenc, and secure in his Christian faith. Finch is a disciplined user of and experimenter with established forms and rhythms, the tailored structures of the sonnet and the quatrain, and use of the iambic pentameter line being characteristic of his work. Finch's poems exhibit an almost total lack...