The Forest Path to the Spring, redemptive as nothing else in Lowry's works, contains his most poetical prose apart from the great novel. It is the seventy-page anchor work in Lowry's only collection, Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (1961). In it Lowry discards all ambiguity of point of view — all those shifting personae of Under the Volcano — for a unity of narrative stance that is without precedent in his fiction. Although employing the "I," Lowry appears reluctant to limit his narrator to a precise identity. He is never given a name. For once here is no writer writing about the writer writing. To be sure, Lowry reveals that his narrator has been a jazz musician, to Gabriola 1503 but he is one who has given up his old life of the night.

What gives Lowry supreme control in The Forest Path to the Spring...