Al Purdy and Milton Acorn have a lot in common, especially in the recent history of Canadian poetry. They both came to maturity at about the same time in the early sixties, not at an early age for either of them. They edited a magazine together in Montreal where Purdy was working in a mattress factory and Acorn was selling his carpenter's tools. Acorn was flopping at Purdy's flat, reading Purdy's library, and being introduced to Purdy's poet-influences, Layton, Dudek, et al. More than one reader thought at the time that Acorn was a pen-name for Purdy. That was all more than ten years ago. Now it is fitting, not to mention fortunate for Acorn, that Purdy edits the selected poems of his old pal [in I've Tasted My Blood: Poems 1956 to 1968]. (p. 84)

Having so many good poems together in one book convinces me that Acorn is not only honest and exciting, as no one has ever doubted, but also very much accomplished as an artist, not so much the natural beast as he has often been envisioned:

          so man's truest home is the wind
          created of his breath
          and he breathes deepest in mystery.

That kind of imagination has as much root in Acorn's earlier trade of carpentry … as does his celebrated socialism. He is still resolved to make his lines run true, to make the sounds render their finest possibilities lying in rime and punctuation, stress and juncture, all the joints fitted by a union man with pride in his craftmanship. (pp. 84-5)

Acorn is an old union man, and he has in his poems as elsewhere a genuine sympathy for people, especially those who get pushed around by systems designed to perpetrate the various poverties capitalism feeds on. He calls himself a communist, but his communism is so pure and human that he would probably be sent away by any postrevolutionary politicians. His politics are as much a poet's communism as Shelley's were. He's a romantic radical, looking to awaken or "find outside the beauty inside me." He has the romantic sense of man's perfectability….

But he doesn't romanticize the poor in the way the bored bourgeoisie do. To be honest about the world (Acorn's intention and his strength) you have to include yourself in it. You don't go slumming. The poor people of the poems live in the next room and you can hear them through the walls. Sometimes Acorn carves his subject's name with a mining drill. (p. 85)

It's a nice heavy book of Acorn's record, the first in six years, and the most accessible. Previously there had been In Love and Anger (1956) as bad as most early privately printed jobs, Against a League of Liars (1961), a small broadside, The Brain's the Target (1960), a chapbook, Jawbreakers (1963), his Contact Press book, and in the same year a special Acorn issue of The Fiddlehead. (pp. 85-6)

As a whole, [Acorn's] later poems employ longer, looser lines, where the careful cutting has gone with the carpenter's tools. A kind of prosy abstraction emerges ("bubble on the universe in a conflagration of dimensions"). At first I was disappointed that the earlier exactitude had faded. But this book shows that Acorn has always known what he's making, and I'm willing to wait hopefully to see what his open-endedness will let free. (p. 86)