SOURCE: "Free Subject," in Canadian Literature, No. 101, Summer, 1984, pp. 149-53.

In the following excerpt, Mandel reviews Bissett's Northern Birds in Color and praises the vitality of his writing.

[Bissett] is certainly Canada's poet of "the tribal dream." Northern Birds, his forty-seventh book of poetry, is a continuation of his constant prayer for the world to be a home for everyone, a vision to be realized by "th heeling vibraysyun uv th trust," a tribal caring of one for another. His poems articulate the grace of acknowledging and yielding to cycles of nature, rage against political and nuclear madness, wittily criticize the pope, dentists, ecological destruction (he has a wonderful plan for cleaning up English Bay involving diving cows), and his own eccentric inconsistencies. Like a rare northern bird, his imagination ranges from vast constellations and cataclysmic visions to minute worlds in grains of sand where

Bissett's remarkable ability...