Joe Rosenblatt is a poet of wit and contrivance—along with John Robert Colombo one of the few to emerge among Canadian experimential poets of the past fifteen years. He delights in outrageous effects—in the juxtaposition of the sublime and the frivolous, the sacred and the obscene, sophisticated surrealism and the blatancies of pure sound.

Since his second book, The LSD Leacock (1966), his predominant theme has been the essential unity of cosmic life. To Rosenblatt, the human, animal, vegetable, and mineral realms share and interchange even their individual atoms of being. As the title of The LSD Leacock implies, he casts himself as a visionary who sees beyond the false and orgulous barriers man has placed between himself and the rest of creation. Like Leacock, he makes cynical note of human hypocrisy, but adds to this an absurd and horrific view of the insect and animal kingdoms as humanity unmasked—humanity stripped of its pretensions to decorum, tradition, etiquette, decency, chivalry, cleanliness, etc. He shows us our fragility in the smear of an egg yolk, our gluttony in the spider's feast.

The direct and exuberant lines of much of The LSD Leacock give place to more delicate and often less powerful writing in The Winter of the Lunar Moth (1968). The strongest poems comprise an opening section on the humanity of fish (and, correspondingly, the piscine nature of man); with a few outstanding exceptions, the book's other poems on bats, insects, and mirrors are uninspiringly formulaic. In this book Rosenblatt often dwells on man's murderous repudiation of his kinship with other sentient beings. (p. 240)

Bumblebee Dithyramb (1972) collects most of the poems of the previous volume and adds almost fifty-three pages of new work. The latter mark a return to the spontaniety of The LSD Leacock. Most of them celebrate the sharing by man and the rest of nature of a single soul of surpassing fertility and creativity. Many are chant poems in praise of the bumblebee … which, together with the flower, comes to symbolize for Rosenblatt the eager submission to sexuality characteristic of non-human life. The poems of Blind Photographer (1973), however, have little of this energy and flamboyance. They are controlled, tightly written pieces that present the same worldview but in ironic and dispassionate terms. Most seem like minor variations on earlier and stronger work.

Rosenblatt's claim to originality is the rich view of the living cosmos his bestiary of bats, spiders, moths, men, fish, and penguins provides. Unfortunately, since Winter of the Lunar Moth he has had much difficulty in extending this view without appearing to repeat himself. He has displayed no firm sense of his own style, even in his early work. His recent books show him to be groping for technical solutions to the personal limits he has encountered. The chants of Bumblebee Dithyramb are transparently modelled on the sound poetry of Bill Bissett; the spare, ironic verse of Blind Photographer on the poetry of Margaret Atwood—to whom it is dedicated. Nevertheless, even the narrow range of Rosenblatt's present accomplishment adds a profound and arresting voice to Canadian poetry. (p. 241)