[John Newlove] is a formalist, alert to the tact as well as the audacity of the creative process. North America celebrates a poetic inebriation, moving the mind from "a medley / of sounds / from other men's / tongues" to "a disinterested / remembrance—/ like a flower, / dried". A heroic fragment stops in his mind like a racial memory; and he asks "through how / many hands / have those words // come?—to me, / so / that the noise / made // of the continent / might be / recovered to / my mind".

This movement into afflatus, and return from it, illustrates the impersonal dimension behind the sparse and controlled movements of his personae. A historical irony, not always explicit, allows him to record these movements in minute and exact perspective…. Occasionally Newlove uses mannerisms from an older and inferior generation of Canadian ironists. At his best, he goes straight to "the root / of common penury for / all of...