A poem should be economic and precise. It should be free of too strong an authorial presence. Objectivity is a virtue that lends shapeliness and focus to the finished product. But [in The Sad Phoenician] Kroetsch is writing about writing, and that changes the rules. There is always, here, a sense of the author lurking behind the language, manipulating, contriving, and interjecting at will….

In a book concerned with basic communication, these characteristics illustrate the struggle of the individual to express publicly his emotions and responses to the external world. The inner and outer world meet on the plain of language, where poetry is the struggle to share experience and perception. And during the life-long conflict, an author must develop a sense of what language and communication mean to him both as the means of expression and as an objective phenomenon—the whole range of the sounds and...