Gwendolyn MacEwan has always been a singer, one who sings forcefully of things exotic and mysterious. Readers and reviewers of [the 60's] responded immediately to her urgent and exuberant utterance even when—in some of the early poems—it approached incoherency. Indeed, a love of sheer sound, encouraged by her poetic idols Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas, sometimes ran away with the poem. But a myth was being unfolded in brief, sharp bursts of sound and imagery. One finds, for instance, from the beginning a desire for escape to other times and worlds (as in the poems of Michael Ondaatje) but also a passionate longing for the integration of opposites or pairs—light and dark, male and female, Canada and the arcane mysteries, past and future. Hers is the alchemical search for the divine in the mundane; magic and myth abound but are expressed in terms of human emotion and an attractively colloquial and flexible voice. (pp. 100-01)

For MacEwen the individual discovery of the universe is also the creation of the universe. The swimmer, the astronaut, the dancer, the magician recur as images of the poet whose activity is mythmaking, the construction from experience of meaningful patterns, and thus of the larger self, the larger consciousness (a process that assumes overtly nationalist and feminist significances in the work of Margaret Atwood). In A Breakfast For Barbarians, MacEwen's first mature collection, the poet is by turns winemaker or magician or an escape artist who finds his way to a new heaven and earth. The poet's "intake" or swallowing of the world in metaphor makes a unity of self and world….

The dangers of this stance and of MacEwen's markedly personal style were always evident, and they are evident in [The Fire-Eaters]…. [Her] poems have truly marvellous ease and energy but sometimes lack over-all shape. Again, one wonders if there is not something of an imbalance in the direction of inner experience here, an evasion of the overwhelming external challenge of Canadian space and society. On a vaster plane, one wonders (sometimes) if MacEwen has always been sufficiently aware of the trickiness, the humour, the irony of the God whom she engages.

To be fair, just such tensions and questions are at the heart of her best work; this is part of the reason for its dramatic effectiveness. In "The Discovery" and "Dark Pines Under Water" she sees … that Canada itself must be approached as exotic mystery. And she remarks early in her career:

O baby, what Hell to be Greek in this country—without wings, but burning anyway….

                                              (p. 101)

In The Fire-Eaters the poet still burns, but it would seem with the fires of perplexity. The book reads like a diary in which the reflections of the day (and the night) are set down…. [This book is] slighter than MacEwen's earlier collections, though it bears on every page the unmistakable stamp of her highly distinctive tone, but it suggests a transitional phase. It will be interesting to see where Canada's mystery-singer finds herself next. (pp. 101-02)