Critical Reception
Eli Mandel’s book, The Family Romance (1986), has been characterized by his quotations from essays on Hugh MacLennan and Northrop Frye’s The Great Code. Both excerpts exemplify Mandel’s questioning of whatever is viewed as orthodoxy. He refuses to let pass what most people simply accept. In this essay collection, it has been recognized that the first piece, Auschwitz and Poetry, is the most powerful and significant and the last of this series of essays, The Border League: American ‘West’ and Canadian ‘Region’, seems to be the least successful. The compilation of Mandel’s work, The Other Harmony: the Collected Poetry of Eli Mandel, is a two volume collection where the first includes works such as Mandel’s contributions to Trio, His Fuseli Poems, An Idiot Joy, Stony Plain, and many others. It has been acknowledged as the more noteworthy of the two volumes in terms of its primary material.
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