[In] spite of the positive qualities one may find in this long overdue selection of Reaney's verse [Selected Shorter Poems], in spite of the evidence of growth, the poetry remains disturbingly eccentric—eccentric not in the sense of being merely odd or whimsical, but in the way it often seems removed from a common centre of human experience. Tarzan of the Apes, the Katzenjammer Kids, fantastic crows, choughs and woodpeckers, Spenser, Yeats, Blake, Isabella Valancy Crawford, the Brontës, Antichrist, Granny Crack—these are some of the figures who jostle in a private mythology which many readers are likely to find more perplexing than illuminating. The alternative vision which Reaney has substituted for the "great sad real" world may, after all, be only an evasion of that reality, not a transformation of it.

Doubts of this sort are likely to be provoked by A Suit of Nettles…. The poem is described by the author as, among many other things, a satire on "all the intellectual institutions of the age," but Reaney can deal with this overlarge subject only by oversimplifying the issues involved…. [His Canadian history, for example, is] seen from the limited perspective of Southern Ontario, perhaps not the best place for a satirist to be standing. Philosophy, too, is disposed of in a charmingly off-hand manner. We are given a merry-go-round ride through the history of the subject, from Parmenides to Heidegger, and end where we began, having learned that the Aristotelean mean can be viewed as "a rather stocky Clydesdale with three saddles, three heads and three buttocks: one buttock is too hairy, the middle one is just right, and the left hand one has no hair at all."

When Reaney attempts to deal with literary criticism the result is not satire but travesty. A distinguished evaluative critic, whose characteristic method is badly misdescribed as "putting poems into order of merit," is allowed to defend his views by saying "Aooh! Bow wowwowwowwowwowwow." One does not need to be a disciple of Dr. Leavis to see that he is here being unfairly treated…. Germaine Warkentin claims [in her introduction] that A Suit of Nettles is the "toughest" and "most serious" long poem in English Canadian literature: "If there is one thing A Suit of Nettles makes you do, it is think." But when Reaney makes us think, he reveals his limitations, particularly his inclination to reduce complicated issues to a few phrases or images, and then to resolve all difficulties by dextrously juggling and patterning these fragments. This method, such as it is, will appeal only to readers seeking an easy escape from the demands of truly ordered thinking. Mr. Reaney's visions are much more appealing than his attempts to deal with the complexities of ordinary reality. (pp. 31-2)