The title of [More Poems for People] is from Poems for People by Dorothy Livesay, to whom it's dedicated, and who "began in this book the tradition of Canadian poets who dedicated their poems and their lives to the working class."… It consists of 47 poems, one prose allegory "The Garbageman is Drunk", and two essays, "On Not Being Banned by the Nazis" … and "What are the Odds?" (a discussion of the possibilities and tactics of resistance should the American Empire invade Canada). Over two thirds of the poems are explicitly political…. Some, like "The Schooner Blue Goose" and "The Microscopic Army Ants of Corsica" are witty political allegory. There are also about a half dozen love lyrics, and an equal number of poems about poetry and the craft of writing.

When Acorn views the Canadian landscape … it isn't a barren wasteland of unnamed horrors, but a land inhabited by the people who work it—miners, Indians, northern Québécois. And there's more than a semantic difference between seeing these people as victims and seeing them as the exploited producers of surplus value in our resource-extracted economy. Some of the landscape or nature poems which don't describe people seem deceptively lyrical, out of place in this book, because of their quite different calm and meditative tone. Actually, Acorn is making a political point in a poem such as "The Mine is Also of Nature":

          Why speak of the old you say? The old grows old in order to become new.
          In a man's, a woman's, a child's mind, a thought
          Twists itself into paradox
          Strangles itself, rots
          Until a new thought, richer—at least it ought to be—than the old;

The philosophical statement is the basis of dialectics from Heraclitus to Engels—the universe is constantly changing.

What Acorn manages to do (consummately, in my opinion) in the nature poems, he fails completely to do with the love lyrics. There seems to be, with one exception, a complete separation between poetry which talks about men and women in love and poetry which talks about the politics of the everyday Canadian experience. The love poems are a pastoral interlude. This is not to say these poems aren't good—in many cases he achieves impressive effects—but there is something disturbing about the fact that the physicality, sensuality or whatever is reserved for the political poems and women are romantically idealized in the love poems (p. 45)

Acorn, however, is a skilled and honest poet who deserves all the exposure he can get. He is not a man to compromise his principles to the media and the book promotion circuit. (p. 46)