Raymond Souster's Neglect

Brian Palmu tries to understand it:

"The only theory I can come up with is Souster's timing. His poetry is in line with the times, and (indeed) one of his two best books is entitled The Colour of the Times (1964). His poetic sensibility was formed in the lean thirties, and any poet who didn't get blown away on a shifting wind was—the same as every poet in England—writing about deprivation, human frailty, metaphysical bafflement and/or anger, social injustice, and hidden graces. But Souster's tentative, plainspoken realism was an awkward fit since his best work was hitting the street just as postmodernism was touching down, and would also have little in common with the later Canada-Council-juiced confessional anecdotes of scores of other poets who would, at first glance, appear natural cohorts."

(Portrait of Raymond Souster by Barker Fairley.)