Seeing in the Dark: The Poetry of Phyllis Webb

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

One problem in contemporary criticism is to avoid simple biographical
interpretations without ignoring the relevance of the author’s
personal experiences on his or her work. This book—the first
full-length study of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb—achieves a good
balance between formal and biographical concerns. At the same time, it
tends to be schematic and reads more like a collection of articles than
a book with an unfolding argument. Like her subject, Butling is an
eclectic thinker, but the relevance of the theories she trains on the
poems is not always evident. Although there is a good bibliography, many
of the longer footnotes should have been incorporated into the text.