There is [a] personal factor that enters into Birney's relations with the west coast Modernists, indeed with the world at large. I [mention] his touchiness, which stems from a deeply experienced supersensitivity, the source doubtless of his art. Generous, democratic, open-handed to other poets he certainly is, traits of the eclectic man. But he is also the isolato, the loner, and for this reason the wanderer. Able to draw on a wide range of influences, he is not inclined to join in, and much of his poetry which takes Canada as its occasion testifies how alien he feels in his own country. It is when Birney is on the road, in Mexico, China, India, where he is an alien, recognized as such, that he seems to relax into his finest delicate-eared, quick-eyed poems. His 'Canadian' poems reveal not only the pain but the writing strain of the alienation...