What is the author's style in Vancouver Lights by Earle Birney?

The poem's descriptive elements utilize concrete imagery and symbolic metaphors to depict a turbulent sea and busy, chaotic city. The active verbs—"wimples," "wraps," "sucks," "webs," "vault," "climb," "falter," "halt"—used to describe the light and darkness in the first stanza echo the ebb and flow of the sea described in the second stanza. Light and darkness themselves symbolize the flow of time and the alternating currents of hope and despair throughout human history.