Compared to the creative mythologizing of Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid …, his selected poems [in There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning To Do: Poems, 1963–1978] are rather lusterless, straining even for their whimsical gestures. He assumes an amusing offcenterness—"The beautiful formed things caught at the wrong moment"—but having invented 31 similes for a child's unmusical voice, he has brought us no nearer that voice. His prosaic experience is implicitly contrasted with the lives of high purpose he is entranced by: Elizabeth I, Darwin, Philoctetes. Since the most affecting poems of his own life are responses to memory, perhaps only the past quickens this poet's imagination.
William Logan, "Poetry: 'There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems, 1963–1978'," in Library Journal (reprinted from Library Journal, April 1, 1979; published by R. R. Bowker Co. (a Xerox company); copyright © 1979 by Xerox Corporation), Vol. 104, No. 7, April 1, 1979, p. 833.
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