A poem should be economic and precise. It should be free of too strong an authorial presence. Objectivity is a virtue that lends shapeliness and focus to the finished product. But [in The Sad Phoenician] Kroetsch is writing about writing, and that changes the rules. There is always, here, a sense of the author lurking behind the language, manipulating, contriving, and interjecting at will….

In a book concerned with basic communication, these characteristics illustrate the struggle of the individual to express publicly his emotions and responses to the external world. The inner and outer world meet on the plain of language, where poetry is the struggle to share experience and perception. And during the life-long conflict, an author must develop a sense of what language and communication mean to him both as the means of expression and as an objective phenomenon—the whole range of the sounds and shapes of letters and words and all that they can be made to mean. Whatever the penalties for being a poet, at least the satisfaction of putting words on paper rewards the author; no matter what else goes wrong in life, he has his 'poetry to protect' him….

But the poetry alone is never enough. The poet lives in a living world; life rushes on about him, he responds to it, he makes it part of his living changing craft. (p. 122)

Kroetsch is always present, reminding the reader that yes there is a real live person behind the poetry, that yes poets are fallible and human—that they want to be recognized as people just as much as they desire fame as poets. (pp. 122-23)

The Sad Phoenician is an ambitious undertaking; an existential portrait of the plight of sensitive individuals, it is an excursion into the turbulent waters of communication that it attempts to describe and chart even as it traverses them for the first time. It is a reminder that each day is capable of presenting a new world, a new-beginning as life-affirming as the tree in the garden, and as dangerous…. A complex poem, The Sad Phoenician defies full analysis in the space of a review: its fuller significance the reader himself must determine.

As if to confirm that the first section of the book is about the poet as human being as well as creative artist, the second part, "The Silent Poet Sequence," presents the poet more objectively. The poems employ a schizoid splitting of personality; two characters emerge: The Poet and The Professor. Both are the same. Any poet lives a double life: if he lives for his writing, he must still earn bread. If he lives for his teaching, he must still answer to his compulsion to write. Sometimes the two urges conflict…. (p. 123)

The humour found throughout the book is hard to describe, yet it has a good deal to do with the final willingness to undergo the frustrations, failures, and imbecilities of life encountered during the quest for ways of expression. (p. 124)