SOURCE: Weatherhead, A. K. “Back to Canada.” Northwest Review 7, no. 1 (spring/summer 1965): 86-9.

In the following review, Weatherhead writes about Near False Creek Mouth.

About twenty-five years ago, just before the last war, Louis MacNeice wrote:

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, You cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold. … Our freedom as free lances Advances toward its end … And soon, my friend We shall have no time for dances. … 

MacNeice is not a widely read poet, but for the English at least, the poem now perfectly recreates the general mood of the time of Munich, at the end of the “chromium-plate” era and its dizzy mayfly blisses—lagondas, roadhouses, cocktails, and tennis in white flannels.

In “November Walk Near False Creek Mouth,” the long, opening poem of his new volume, Earle Birney has found, one generation later, that the sunlight has again...