Gwendolyn MacEwen's poems are filled with the things the wants. And the language of the poems is a language of ambition, of wanting. It stands outside the mainstream of current Canadian poetry, which seems generally to belong to the post-Williams age. That is, Miss MacEwen's language is opposite to the language of … Raymond Souster. One is aware of something like poetic diction, not the rhythmic arrangement of a prose line. In a poem like "All The Fine Young Horses", for instance, her "issues" if she claims any, are not of matter and the senses, but of a young, feminine, personal imagination. Anthology-makers or those who teach survey courses might call her a Romantic….

[The Rising Fire] is the first major collection of Miss MacEwen's poetry…. [The] best poems are the later ones, and the book would be more enjoyable if the whole thing were made up of the...