[In the following review, Frye offers a positive review of Birney's first published collection of poetry.]

This is a book [David and Other Poems] for those interested in Canadian poetry to buy and for those interested in complaining that we haven't got any to ignore. Anyone who follows Canadian verse at all closely will be very pleased to see Mr. Birney's fugitive pieces gathered into one volume, and anyone who read the title poem when it first appeared in the Forum will be keenly interested in finding it again in a published book as part of a larger collection.

The people who are familiar with the conventions of modern poetry, who can grasp its difficult language and place its recondite illusions, now form a specialized cult largely confined to universities. “David” will get the full approval of this audience as being on its own merits a touching, beautiful and sensitively written story. But a large reserve of intelligent readers, not in the cult but willing to listen to a poet who has a real story to tell and who tells it simply and honestly, will also like this poem. The more blasé will take a while to recover from their surprise at seeing, in a volume of contemporary verse, a straightforward narrative cut to fit the “common reader,” without flounces of fake symbolism, gathers of atmosphere, tucks of philosophic rumination, or fullness of garrulous comment. But they will like it too. “David” is the best thing of its kind that I have seen in current poetry—and for some benighted reason its kind is rare.

The other poems are uneven, but frequently reach the high level of the title piece. As a lyrical poet, Mr. Birney is chiefly an artist in vignette, a sharp and humorous observer. His humor on the whole is best when least directly satiric: satire makes him relapse into an idiom more suitable to prose. But he utters “conceits,” or deliberately strained images, with exactly the right kind of deadpan delivery, and his meticulous study of a slug, which should now be famous through its inclusion in Gustafson's Pelican anthology, is a shimmering rich texture of poetic wit from beginning to end. This indicates that he is not, in spite of the simplicity of “David,” a naive poet, and there are some brilliant flashes of imagery, of the kind that come from short-circuiting associations, notably in the briefer lyrics, such as “Monody on a Century” and “European Nocturne.” A tendency to a rather facile animism, of the “grassy hair of old hobo ocean” variety, is the only weakness of an important virtue.

Quizzical and ironic imagery is frequent in North American poetry: the source of it is usually the fascinating stare of an indifferent Nature which was here long before man and could very well get along without him. In such a poet as Robinson Jeffers, whose Pacific symbolism Mr. Birney occasionally recalls, this develops into a philosophy of tragic nihilism; in such a poet as E. J. Pratt, the immense debauchery of Nature, its gigantic appetite for life and its incredible waste of it, is transmuted into strange visions of submarine souses, pliocene Armageddons, and maddened savages with a “viscous melanotic current” coursing through their blood. The former results in slick, portentous, stereotyped oratory; the richer humor and greater subtlety of the latter is a spiritual truancy (see elsewhere in these pages) which refuses to over-simplify the imagination. In searching for the basis of his own attitude, Mr. Birney gives us an example of each tendency. “Dusk on English Bay,” a vision of a spinning world at peace and at war, comes to a simple time-marches-on conclusion which seems to me rather frivolous: “Vancouver Lights,” ending in a tone of quiet resistance, is far more impressive.

The most obvious technical influence on Mr. Birney's work—he has gone somewhat out of his way to underline it—is the alliterative line and kenning of Old English. This is frequently claimed as an influence by modern poets, though many of them end up by producing imitations of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, along with William Morris, started a vogue in the last century for bumping over offbeats, babbling bastard “Beowulf.” Here the influence is genuine, but the technique is difficult, and easily gets out of hand. It does so, for instance, when the alliteration becomes part of an over-elaborate pattern of repetition—the rhymes, for example, are sometimes harsh and insensitive—and it does so when the use of kennings and compound words makes the diction sound rather spiky and self-conscious. The rhythm also could sometimes be more fluent: there are too many run-on lines, especially in “David,” which have nowhere in particular to run to. I mention these details because this is not one of those impeccable and immaculate first volumes which “promise” nothing but more of the same. Just as a pregnant woman is in too interesting a condition to win a beauty contest, so the many and remarkable virtues of these poems are accompanied by faults which guarantee an increase of fertility. In case you didn't get the point the first time, for those who care about Canadian poetry this book is good enough to buy, not to borrow or get from a library.