The publication of Everson at Eighty in 1983 honored a man whose fifty-year contribution to Canadian letters has been quiet, constant, and without fanfare. Edited by Al Purdy, selecting from Everson's earlier volumes and also introducing some new poems, Everson at Eighty reveals the poet's conservative Ontario morality, his mature creativity, and his continuing passion for poetry. Traditional in syntax and in some ways old-fashioned in vocabulary, writing what Purdy calls "almost a guideline to a never-never world of the future." Everson still remains relevant and contemporary. In these introductory statements are some of the central paradoxes of Everson's life. For fanfare (as in his career in public relations) is precisely what he has unobtrusively brought to others, avoiding it for himself; and the passion of his poetry takes the formal shape of metaphor and muted observation.

Insufficiently acknowledged in his native land, though praised by the American poet...