[Through] changes of venue and circumstance Mr. Skelton's verse retains its characteristic diction, stance, and rhythm. His normative mode works through short lines in strongly stressed dimeters or trimeters, conventional syntax, whether rhymed or no, and a vatic stance. (pp. 339-40)

These poems [in his retrospective Selected Poems] abound with such words as leaf, star, rock, love, breath, beast, death, the vocabulary of Celtic bards, of Yeats and Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins rather than the ironic, self-deprecatory domesticities of The (London) Movement and The Group. It is not surprising that Robin Skelton made anthologies of Irish verse and emigrated to British Columbia.

This Romantic amplitude of feeling and commitment to inherited meters is evident, too, in his ballads. I much prefer the Blakeian quatrains of A Ballad of Johnnie Question and A Ballad of Despair to the longer ballads in part three of the book. These swiftly...