Judging from a sampling of recent critical commentary on his collected Poems, Reaney's reputation is in [a slump] …; which is a shame. Any poet who has created an original body of work, especially one of such uniqueness, power, peculiarity and, sometimes, unprecedented weirdness as Reaney's deserves better treatment. A critic might begin by attempting to actually read the poems, as opposed to reading into them various philosophies and literary theories which the poet is assumed to have. If you start this way, with the actual poems, one of your first reactions will almost certainly be that there is nothing else like them.

I'd never before read most of the uncollected single poems,… so I was most intrigued by sections I, III and V of this volume. I was especially struck by the early appearance of a number of Reaney images which crop up again and again, variously disguised, in his later work. The fascination with maps and diagrams ("Maps", 1945), the collections of objects ("The Antiquary", 1946), the sinister females, both mechanical ("Night Train", 1946) and biological ("Madame Moth", 1947), and that nightmare, the Orphanage, already present in "Playbox", 1945—all foreshadow later and more fully realized appearances.

But what became clear to me during a chronological reading of this book is that most commentators—including Reaney himself, and his editor and critics—are somewhat off-target about the much-discussed influence of Frye on his work. I have long entertained a private vision of Frye reading through Reaney while muttering "What have I wrought?" or "This is not what I meant, at all," and this collection confirms it. Reaney is to Frye as a Salem, Mass. 17th century tombstone is to an Italian Renaissance angel: Reaney and the tombstone may have been "influenced", but they are primitives (though later in time) and their models are sophisticates. The influence of Frye, however, was probably a catalyst for Reaney rather than a new ingredient; let me do a little deductive speculation.

The world presented to us in the early poems, up to and including The Red Heart (1949), does not "work" for the poet on any level. The people in them are bored and trivial, like "Mrs. Wentworth", or they are actual or potential orphans, loveless, lost or disinherited, like the speaker in "Playbox"…. The reverse side of the melancholy state of being an orphan—hate for and disgust at the rest of the world and the desire for revenge—is explored in two other orphan poems, "The English Orphan's Monologue" and "The Orphanage"…. In these "social" poems, Reaney does not analyze, he dramatizes; and, like a dramatist, he counterpoints. Thus to the smothered longing of the provincial in the "Canadian" poems he opposes the sneering of a cosmopolite who has escaped the Fathers of Confederation [and] is reading Tristram Shandy and Anais Nin…. If this poem had been written by anyone else but Reaney, everyone would have called it savage socialist satire; in fact it's a good deal more savage and socialist than much that passes by that name.

In these early poems the objects—and the poems bulge with objects—create the effect of a kind of rummage sale, partly because the objects are lacking in all but personal significance…. The speaker can rarely make "sense" of them by relating them to anything else; all he can do is record them, and the effect is a still-life, captured and rendered immobile…. (pp. 113-15)

In the early poems on "love"—and there are quite a few of them—the love is either unconsummated, as in "Platonic Love", or it turns into sex, which is as inextricably linked with death as it is in the poetry of Al Purdy. This is sex observed through a child's eyes, foreign and monstrous. At times Reaney manages a kind of queasy humour…. More often it is simple horror, mixed with revulsion, as in "The Orphanage"….

Reaney's early world, then, is an unredeemed one, populated with orphans and spiritual exiles, littered with couples engaged in joyless, revolting and dangerous copulation, and crammed with objects devoid of significance. In it, babies are doomed as soon as conceived (as in "Dark Lagoon"), the "real world" is the one described at the end of "The School Globe", filled with "blood, pus, horror, stepmothers and lies", and the only escape is the temporary and unsatisfactory one of nostalgic daydreaming. If you believed you lived in such a world, you'd surely find the negative overwhelming. Anyone familiar with the techniques of brainwashing knows that all you have to do to convert almost anyone to almost anything is subject him to a nearly intolerable pressure, then offer him a way out. The intolerable pressures rendered with such verbal richness in the earlier poems are those of the traditional Christian version of this earth, but with Christ (and escape to Heaven) removed; sin with no possibility of redemption, a fallen world with no divine counterpart.

[Northrop] Frye's literary theories—this is a guess—would surely have offered Reaney his discredited childhood religion in a different, more sophisticated, acceptable form: the Bible might not be literally true, but under the aegis of Frye it could be seen as metaphorically, psychically true. Frye's "influence", then, is not a matter of the critic's hardedged mind cutting out the poet's soul in its own shapes, like cookie dough: "influence", for good poets, is surely in any case just a matter of taking what you need or, in reality, what you already have. (p. 115)

Horror remains and evil is still a presence, but a way past the world, the flesh and the devil is now possible. The redemptive agents are all invisible, internal: they are the imagination, the memory, verbal magic (Reaney has several poems about language, and many references to the magic tongue) and—I'm thinking here of the short story "The Bully"—dream. These elements are so important in Reaney's work because the hideousness of existence can be redeemed by them alone: it is the individual's inner vision, not the external social order, that must change if anything is to be salvaged.

It is this arrangement of priorities that surely accounts not only for some of Reaney's themes, but also for some of his characteristic structures, in the plays as well as the poems. The pattern I'm thinking of is that of the sudden conversion—a Protestant rather than a Catholic pattern. If you think of the Divine Comedy with the Purgatorio left out you'll see what I mean: we get the hellishness of the "earthly" situation and the quick turnabout followed by a transcendent vision, but we are never told how you get to the vision—what process you undergo, what brings it about. No indulgences sold here; it's Faith, not Works and you just somehow have to "see". (pp. 115-16)

In Reaney's work, the Songs of Innocence come after the Songs of Experience; in fact, you can take a number of figures or images from the earlier poems and follow them through the corpus, watching how the Lost Child gets found (most notably in Night-Blooming Cereus), how the sinister Orphan gets changed into the harmless comic-strip Little Orphan Annie, how the baby doomed from before birth is allowed more latitude …, and how the collection of random objects is permitted (or perhaps forced) to have universal significance…. (p. 116)

The problems I have with Reaney's work are both theoretical (I can't see certain pieces of evil, for instance Hitler and the Vietnam War, as angelic visitations or even unreal, no matter how hard I try; and I don't think that's a flaw in my vision) and practical—that is, some of the poems work admirably for me and others don't get off the ground at all. Reaney's best poems come from a fusion of "personal" and "mythic" or "universal"; when they lean too far towards either side, you get obscurity or straight nostalgia at one end or bloodless abstraction at the other. And at times, reading his work, I feel the stirrings of that old Romantic distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, though I try hard to suppress it; I even hear a voice murmuring "Whimsy", and it murmurs loudest when I come across a concrete image linked arbitrarily and with violence to a "universal" meaning. If you can see a world in a grain of sand, well, good; but you shouldn't stick one on just because you think it ought to be there.

But this is a Collected rather than a Selected; it isn't supposed to be Reaney's best poems, it's all of his poems, and I can't think of any poet who produces uniformly splendid work. It's by his best, however, that a writer should ultimately be judged; and Reaney's best has an unmistakable quality, both stylistic and thematic, and a strength that is present only when a poet is touching on something fundamental. Certain of Reaney's poems do admirably what a number of his others attempt less successfully: they articulate the primitive forms of the human imagination, they flesh out the soul, they dramatize—like Blake's "Mental Traveller"—the stances of the self in relation to the universe. That sounds fairly heavy; what I mean is that Reaney gets down to the basics—love, hate, terror, joy—and gives them a shape that evokes them for the reader. This is conjuring, it's magic and spells rather than meditation, description or ruminating; Coleridge rather than Wordsworth, MacEwen rather than Souster. The trouble with being a magic poet is that when you fail, you fail more obviously than the meditative or descriptive poet: the rabbit simply refuses to emerge from the hat. But you take greater risks, and Reaney takes every risk in the bag, including a number of technical ones that few others would even consider attempting. (p. 117)