Phyllis Webb's most recent and most complex book, Naked Poems, confirms a preoccupation with certain themes—love, poetry, and love as poetry—which was already evident in Even Your Right Eye (1956)…. The Naked Poems clarifies and perhaps finalizes a tendency apparent in the earlier volume towards reduction or refinement as Miss Webb's characteristic solution to certain technical problems arising out of her particular emotional and intellectual temperament…. This solution reflects the poet's attitude towards life. No moment is too short, no event too small, no experience too trivial, to merit the poet's attention. The poems are "small" not because the subject-matter is unimportant, but because the poet's eye sees precisely. Apparently casual and often brief, her glance is exacting and uncompromising. She refuses to magnify or over-state. (p. 29)

Introducing the "Naked Poems" … at a 1963 poetry reading in Edmonton, Miss Webb called them poems refined down to the "bone-essential...