In this collection Yates's individual style begins to emerge clearly: the verse is increasingly enigmatic and disjointed, the language drawn from a wider variety of scientific and philosophic sources. Yates's obsession with the connection between words and experience, syntax and sense, sound and idea is also fully evident: "How much do the instincts dare absorb"/God was an incomplete sentence and/By and by the wilderness came over me." The poetry is introspective: the poet's concern with the self and the other is expressed repeatedly in metaphors of sea, rocks, and sky. The poems are rhythmical, with a musical beat appropriate to a canticle, but they also demonstrate that abstraction and illogic that are characteristic of electronic music. The language is stripped bare, although it is often plangent and evocative.
Yates's first collection of fiction, Man in the Glass Octopus, appeared in 1968 with an appreciative introduction by his friend and colleague a UBC Robert Harlow.
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