[The] permanent ground of Souster's poetry is human deprivation and loss. Unlike other poets who find their dream of happiness and fulfilment in the future, or even in the present, he looks backward to the past…. Happiness is "a lost but recovered joy"; and all are "groping for something lost they will never find / in the drab of the street, in the dirt, in the smoke, in the noise." The imagery of youth usually conveys this meaning of loss in Souster's poetry, as in "Young Girls", where it is also an image of sexual promise; or in the poem remembering boyhood—

        It's nothing but desire to live again, fresh from the
        beginning like a child.

Some of his most moving and beautiful poems turn on this theme…. [Joy] is often the achieved reward of Souster's patient realistic vision, so that retrospective nostalgia is only a more defeated direction...