[In] spite of the positive qualities one may find in this long overdue selection of Reaney's verse [Selected Shorter Poems], in spite of the evidence of growth, the poetry remains disturbingly eccentric—eccentric not in the sense of being merely odd or whimsical, but in the way it often seems removed from a common centre of human experience. Tarzan of the Apes, the Katzenjammer Kids, fantastic crows, choughs and woodpeckers, Spenser, Yeats, Blake, Isabella Valancy Crawford, the Brontës, Antichrist, Granny Crack—these are some of the figures who jostle in a private mythology which many readers are likely to find more perplexing than illuminating. The alternative vision which Reaney has substituted for the "great sad real" world may, after all, be only an evasion of that reality, not a transformation of it.

Doubts of this sort are likely to be provoked by A Suit of Nettles…. The...