SOURCE: "Self Selected/Selected Self: Bill Bissett's BEYOND EVEN FAITHFUL LEGENDS, " in Canadian Poetry, No. 34, Spring-Summer, 1994, pp. 57-78.

In the following excerpt, Precosky discusses the significance of the order of poems in BEYOND EVEN FAITHFUL LEGENDS.

When a poet selects and arranges his poetry for a retrospective collection we must pay special attention, because he is probably telling us something about the way in which he views his work. While the revisions performed on certain individual poems are an interesting subject of study and conjecture, bissett's ultimate act of revision in Beyond Even Faithful Legends lies in his selection and arrangement of the poems for the book. In this book, the poems are not arranged in order according to publication or composition date. And, in those rare instances when consecutive poems in the Selected are from the same book, they were not in the same order in the...