[After reading his Collected Poems I find that] Irving Layton is a poet whom one reads at his best with delight, and at his worst with a puzzled wonder that so good a poet could write and—even more astonishing—could publish such wretched verse…. (p. 5)

For all his flamboyance of manner, Layton is capable of some extraordinary lapses into mere triteness and triviality…. He can also perpetuate, with a coy archness that seems out of character, some of the weakest jokes that can ever have been given the shape of verse…. (pp. 6-7)

[Layton] is one of those half-fortunate writers who have a way with words and phrases, an almost fatal ability to make a statement on any subject in a heightened rhetorical manner, without necessarily producing more than a chunk of coloured prose chopped into lines or a doggerel jingle; when he cannot write a poem...