Gwendolyn MacEwan has always been a singer, one who sings forcefully of things exotic and mysterious. Readers and reviewers of [the 60's] responded immediately to her urgent and exuberant utterance even when—in some of the early poems—it approached incoherency. Indeed, a love of sheer sound, encouraged by her poetic idols Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, sometimes ran away with the poem. But a myth was being unfolded in brief, sharp bursts of sound and imagery. One finds, for instance, from the beginning a desire for escape to other times and worlds (as in the poems of Michael Ondaatje) but also a passionate longing for the integration of opposites or pairs—light and dark, male and female, Canada and the arcane mysteries, past and future. Hers is the alchemical search for the divine in the mundane; magic and myth abound but are expressed in terms of human...