[Ewart] is a joker, taking the piss out of everyone and himself and doing it better than competently. In Pleasures of the Flesh, with a poem called 'Short Time', he manages to deflate even "… the gentle hypocrite reader." He also analyses, very comically, certain sexual "types". The series 'Eight Awful Animals', describing fauna with names like "Panteebra" and "Stuffalo", is a wonderful classification of stereotypes, from the butch lesbian to the exclusive masturbator. In The Deceptive Grin … it is the advertising industry, the rat-racers and the slogan-mongers who come in for it. The Gavin Ewart Show is catholic. (p. 64)

[He] claims to be the inventor of the "ewart" (sic!) or count-down poem, where the unrhymed stanzas have a line length of 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 (following John Cage into silence?) he is not so exclusive that he will not take a trick or two from O. Nash, W. Stevens and Wm. McGonagall...