SOURCE: "Critical Improvisations on Margaret Avison's Winter Sun," in The Tamarack Review, No. 18, Winter, 1981, pp. 81-6.

Smith was a Canadian educator and poet. Below, he offers a favorable review of Winter Sun, concluding: "rarely has a poet so compactly and richly identified sensation and thought."

In the beginning was the Word.

Let us begin then with the word. Start with discrete particles. Look at the bricks.

My house, she says, is made of old newspapers.

But newspapers, like poems are made of words. Let us look at the words.

Epithets are significant in poetry. Here are some of her favourites: odd, curious, brave, bleak, deft, forlorn, fair, desolate, precious, Muscovite, wry. A strange, courtly, almost Spenserian flavour. Remark a few other words: fabrique, old Mutabilitie, remarked, iwis, and the exclamation but soft! and we'd be well into the Wood of Error. Better stop, turn round, look again, and...