Alden Nowlan will not be remembered as a formative influence on literature in Canada. He has never considered stylistic innovation as necessary to communicate his experience; moreover, his views in themselves are not radically different from those of...

Reading the body of Alden Nowlan's work one begins to share his acute feeling for place. The ideal landscapes of Roberts and Carman, his literary ancestors, are the ones he avoids and de-mythologizes…. To get beneath a Maritime cliché the poet [at times] brandishes a prudery he recognizes and undercuts a countryside he does not…. As he views it, the Real McCoy resides not in any Platonic folder, the idea of landscape, but in the stab of the river above and below the ice, in winte...

The most important contemporary poet of the Maritimes, as well as the most prolific, is Alden Nowlan…. Replying to a question by the editor of Contemporary Poets of the English Language (1970), Nowlan remarked: 'I write about what it is like to be Alden Nowlan because that is the only thing I know anything about.' If one takes that as something more than mere solipsism, it is a true statement, for Nowlan is one of the microcosmic-macrocosmic poets, constantly moving within his own world...

Alden Nowlan's The Things which Are, taking its title from the Book of Revelation, plunges [into a kind of visionary sense of reality]…. It is native Canadian realism (the book is dedicated to Souster) with a sporadic symbolism drawn from reality that is literally hair-raising in its effects. This goes beyound just "good Canadian poetry"—it is incredibly good. Poems like "The Bull Moose", "The Execution", and "Novelty Booth", are a...