While bissett's poetic is fairly obvious in many of his volumes, two are expressly addressed to questions of language and style: Rush / What Fuckan Theory (1971) and Words in th Fire (1972). The first of these is a book subverted by its own attitudes. As an assertion of bissett's idea that relationships such as hierarchy, cause-effect sequences, and linear writing are repressive, Rush proclaims its defiance by remaining determinedly incoherent. The verbal chaos is extreme; only occasionally are there passages of striking intellectual or lyrical interest. Almost all the important points in bissett's aesthetic view which are diffused, obscured and repeated elsewhere in the book, are tellingly concentrated in one poem, "Poetry dusint have to be," which presents some of his most persistent themes. He declares that poetry should be free from any prescriptions of subject; indeed, like the most elementary child's play, it can do "nothing well." Nevertheless, as...