SOURCE: "A Dash for the Border," in Canadian Literature, No. 56, Spring, 1973, pp. 89-92.

Scobie is a Scottish-born Canadian poet, author, and educator. In the following review of drifting into war, he discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Bissett's poetic method.

In Bill Bissett, we continue to find a tremendous energy of form, directed almost against itself. Bissett reaches to the edges of language and destroys it, yet keeps returning. The visual forms on the page (and how curious to see the determined untidiness of Bissett's gestetnered productions faithfully reproduced in the normally immaculate Talon format) always tend towards the destruction of any form they set up, while in sound Bissett returns to the strict and revivifying form of the chant. One tends to think of Bissett as a romantic artist, with a strong innate capacity for self-destruction, but he is also (at what I think is his best...