What [Nobody Owns th Earth,] makes clearest is that Bill Bissett is specifically a religious poet. His vision is of a transcendent, static world, simple and hard in outline, paralleling our own complex and sordid one just beyond the usual limitations of human perception…. More Blakean than Emersonian, this other world can become visible to us during prayers, incantations, or dreams…. (p. 44)

At moments of extreme intensity—religious trances, sexual intercourse—the subject can enter completely into this elemental world of eternal condition. Thus early in Nobody Owns th Earth is a group of love poems…. The religious counterparts to these poems are the mantras, the prayers, the incantations—"Added Weight," "Prayers for th One Habitation," "Armageddon News," "Tempul Firing," and "Holy Day."… (pp. 44-5)

Because of the Platonic overtones of these overtly religious poems, their diction can appear limited and infantile. The dominant part of speech is the noun; most nouns are from a narrow elemental range—tree, fire, wind, water, sky, sun, moon, blood, wave, heart (in some books by Bissett such a list would account for 80% of the nouns). They are nearly always unmodified. But Bissett is not being childish; he is simply attempting to write of an unqualified, pure, archtypical, visionary world—a world distinguished from ours by its lack of pluralities, multiplicities, divergencies, by its consisting only of elemental substance. Bissett's idiosyncratic spellings are also simplifications, meant to indicate a consciousness more attuned to cosmic non-complexity than to earthly convention—and largely successful in doing this.

In the other part of his poetry, poetry probably more attractive to the average reader, we see the corollary to Bissett's mysticism. The poet who loves heaven lives in hell—a hell not only of materiality and plurality but of deceit, brutality, and exploitation, a hell where one of the first things the poet is moved to ask is "were yu normal today did yu screw society."… (pp. 44-5)

The two sides to Bissett's poetry cannot be fully understood in separation. One is the religious man's hope; the other his horror at what still surrounds him. They can also not be understood by this collection's title and dustjacket. The title Nobody Owns th Earth, centring on the ecological cliché, suggests a this-world one which is Bissett's particular achievement. Bissett's dustjacket sentimentality would have us believe his work is about ecology and social revolution. But his own vocabulary testifies that the new world he envisions lies far beyond our time-bound universe. Bissett is Blakean rather than Marxist, and, as he himself knows, requires Armageddon rather than revolution for his vision's fulfilment. (p. 45)