Certainly the one hundred pieces [in Poems New and Collected] show Smith to be a chameleon—he can viciously dismiss the vacuity of 'popular poetry', he can articulate his committment to sing the "lonely music" or to encounter "voluptuous" death, and yet he can delight his reader with such flippant remarks as:

        McLuhan put his telescope to his ear;
        What a lovely smell, he said, we have here.

The question raised by the bewildering variety of Poems New and Collected is whether to assess the poems individually in their own terms or to attempt to discover whatever unity lies at the core of the collection. Neither of these approaches has proved wholly fruitful…. It would thus appear desirable to approach each poem in its own terms and then, having estimated its unique value, to ascertain where it fits into the tenor of the collection. With this in mind...