SOURCE: McDonald, Larry. “‘Cortés and All Dat Crap’: Earle Birney's Travel Poetry.” Wascana Review of Contemporary Poetry and Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (spring 1995): 33-48.

In the following essay, McDonald examines theme, structure, and perspective in Birney's travel poetry, noting that he was among the first literary figures to champion cultural diversity and the disadvantages of social and economic inequity worldwide.

Between 1955 and 1962, at a time when few poets were interested in different cultures or marginalized voices, Earle Birney wrote almost exclusively about their oppression by the North American culture to which he himself belonged. He wrote to foster the introduction of colonized cultures into Canadian consciousness, and he wrote to argue for their political and economic liberation.

What is most impressive and invaluable about his travel poetry, which comprises by far the bulk of Volume 2 of his Collected Poems, is that his writing is centrally concerned with the...