In her selection of Bill Bissett's poetry for the volume Nobody Owns Th Earth, Margaret Atwood provided Bissett with what many of his readers had long felt he needed: a good editor. While Bissett has seldom published anything totally without interest, or without flashes of his own very individual brilliance, far too many of the books and pamphlets which pour out of the Blew Ointment Press have been random and haphazard collections of whatever he had to hand, with the good poems inextricably mixed up among the bad.

Indeed, it might be argued that this randomness, this deliberate abdication of selectivity and control, are so central to Bissett's aesthetic and life-style that it would seem like a distortion of his vision for him to present a tightly edited, carefully chosen selection. Certainly Bissett is best when read at some length, but Atwood's selection goes some way towards proving that the better poems can be successfully separated from the mass.

Nor is it absolutely clear that Bissett at his best does depend on uncontrolled haphazardness. On the contrary, his chants depend on a very strict manipulation of rhythmical effects, and anyone who has heard him perform can testify to the extraordinary control he has over his voice. Moreover, in some of his longer satirical poems—I'm thinking especially of "Th' Emergency Ward" and "Killer Whale"—the pretence of the poem's being an unadulterated recital of facts is surely just a pretence. These poems practice a kind of reticence, an ironic understatement, a refusal to comment which is in the end far more effective than any actual comment could have been (especially the rather frenzied political rhetoric that Bissett often indulges in). These poems, with their very studied naivety in accepting all the strange things that happen to him, show Bissett as a master of narrative and ironic tone.

These considerations are very important when approaching Pomes for Yoshi, which I think is Bissett's best collection to date (excluding Atwood's selection.) In the first place, it is a book with a unified theme: in effect, it is one long sequence of poems in which every piece bears directly on the central concerns. The major concern is with the poet's love for a girl called Yoshi, who has left him (he hopes temporarily) because she wants to be alone for a while. Juxtaposed to the poet's expressions of longing, as a kind of contrapuntal minor concern, are accounts of Bissett's attempts to move out of the house he's living in. The increasingly hectic disorder of that house may be taken as an image of the disorder of the poet's emotions, and his final escape to a saner, more human environment hints at a resolution of the major theme as well.

In the love poems, Bissett tackles head on the oldest poetic theme in the world, and he succeeds in giving it a remarkable freshness by the very naivety, directness, and openness with which he treats it. In simple, colloquial language he speaks of how he misses her, and of how he accepts her need to be away from him for a while, even if she's with some other man. Love is not possession, Bissett says, and seldom has this ideal been realised more fully and more convincingly. The poems take the emotional warmth and idealistic romanticism of Bissett's earlier work and manage to focus them on a particular situation, a particular relationship.

The sub-theme, the housemoving, reaches its climax in a long poem at the end of the book which fully deserves to stand alongside "Th' Emergency Ward" and "Killer Whale". As with these poems, the ostensible form is that of a purely factual narrative of an increasingly fantastic sequence of events. (Bissett appears to be the kind of person that the wildest things just naturally happen to.) But again, the tone is perfectly judged, and the absence of comment becomes a comment in itself. It also produces a hilarious kind of straight-faced humour.

None of this, I think, is accidental. It is a product of Bissett's life-style and aesthetic (the two are almost the same), an openness which seems naive but isn't, an innocence which has gone through experience and out the other side, a purity of outlook which brings freshness to the most outrageously clichéd situations and phrases. Nothing but this consistency of tone could account for the way in which Bissett is able to use such terrible clichés of counter-culture jargon as "Far out", "I can dig it", "Heavy", and "Got to get my shit together" with such complete honesty that the reader accepts them as being meaningful (accurate descriptions of a certain state of mind), amusing (in slyly self-mocking, understated asides), and even deeply moving (see especially the final page of the book).

Such sophisticated manipulations of language may be accidental, or unconscious, but I rather doubt it. Pomes for Yoshi strikes me as a very carefully crafted book, as well as a deeply personal one. It is surely the mark of a good poet that very strong personal emotions intensify rather than decrease his sensitivity to language. Such is certainly the case with this book.