SOURCE: "Bissett's Best," in Canadian Literature, Vol. 60, Spring, 1974, pp. 120-22.

In the following review of pomes for yoshi, Scobie argues that, despite appearances, Bissett's work is the result of careful stylistic control.

In her selection of Bill Bissett's poetry for the volume Nobody Owns Th Earth, Margaret Atwood provided Bissett with what many of his readers had long felt he needed: a good editor. While Bissett has seldom published anything totally without interest, or without flashes of his own very individual brilliance, far too many of the books and pamphlets which pour out of the Blew Ointment Press have been random and haphazard collections of whatever he had to hand, with the good poems inextricably mixed up among the bad.

Indeed, it might be argued that this randomness, this deliberate abdication of selectivity and control, are so central to Bissett's aesthetic and life-style that it would seem like...