Michael Ondaatje's poems in There's a Trick With a Knife I'm Learning to Do … use the lyric as a weapon…. [His] landscapes are populated by horrifying figures and events. It's a fashionable track, and any number of aspirants can turn out a glum swatch of verse given a dead animal or nightmare inspired by an anchovy pizza. Yet Ondaatje rises above the usual muck with an aggressively inventive, if sometimes offhanded, flourish. His freshness creates its own season of isolation in "the cell of civilized magic." (p. 578)

G. E. Murray, "Six Poets," in The Nation (copyright 1979 by the Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 228, No. 19, May 19, 1979, pp. 578, 580.∗