IT IS BECOMING INCREASINGLY difficult to distinguish BiC profiles and interviews from advertisements. A profile, for example, by definition requires contrast between background and figure, a discernible edge. The latter is distinctly absent from David Homel's adulation for Steven Heighton in the May issue. I don't want to rain on anyone's parade and I wish Heighton continued success, but I don't think he, or BiC, is well served by the milk- soaked bread that passes for literary fare in this piece.

Reading Heighton's "Father" (excerpted from On earth as it is in the profile) what struck me was this writer's carelessness: in the way "shelled," for example, cracks rather than continues the metaphorical system of "membrane ... amniotic"; in the incongruous image of the surgeons' hands "palms up"; in the colloquial misstep of the repeated "supposing"; in the mismanaged simile of the "I.V. bags" inside the body; in the mistensed "had always involved his father too" and "now their words were no consolation"; in the tautology of "tantalizing, close enough to touch"; in the misuse of "floundering" in "floundering down from the sky"; and in the improbably "rotted" contents of the garbage bag dropped from a passing jet (how long has it been up there?). If these four paragraphs are typical of this writer's craft and control of his talent, indeed, of a writer whom Al Purdy has imprimatured as "one of the best writers of his generation, maybe the best" (in the April BiC), then our horizons have shrunk drastically.

Purdy's "best" bite is an example of the "extravagant rhetoric" Barbara Carey discusses in her column, "Greatest Hits," in the same issue. A different form of such hyperbole can be found in Colin Morton's review of Michael Holmes's book of poems, james i wanted to ask you ("Glimpses of Imagination"), and his judgement that "Holmes, a literature student in the age of theory, carries just as much intellectual baggage as Milton did, though of a different kind." In support of this, Morton quotes this late-20th-century Milton's profound apophthegm that "there are two kinds of people in the world //... you either choose to be an ernie, or you're gonna be a bert." The point is not that Holmes is or is not a poet comparable to Milton -- personally, from the evidence of the quoted excerpts he seems closer to those other Miltons, Acorn and Berle (perhaps we should ask Purdy for his opinion here) -- but that such a remark suggests that Morton as a reviewer-critic is next to worthless. To describe Holmes's book as "a 1990s update of Milton's 'Lycidas"' reveals a mind on the edge of a swamp. Do poets write "updates"? I wonder when Morton last read Milton? Perhaps around the same time he thought he understood Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent." (A swamp, by the way, is where Heighton should know that people often "flounder.") While it is probably indisputable that one of the greatest intellects of the 17th century, if he had lived in our own day, would have been a devotee of "Sesame Street," and may even have recognized in the E section of Bramalea a cosmological trope, Holmes can only be hurt by the kind of unthinking gloss Morton offers; he, in fact, must be both embarrassed and upset at the unintended joke which it makes of him and his poem.

If BiC sees its (laudable) mission as primarily a combination of information and boosterism for Canadian writing, it should nevertheless be concerned with the prerequisites of credibility upon which any journal's effectiveness in our literary culture depends. Profiles with an edge, interviews in which a critical engages a creative mind, and reviews which inform and evaluate knowledgeably and credibly would not jeopardize this mission. In my view, they would keep it on track and also make for an all around better read.

I WRITE TO LET YOU KNOW HOW much I enjoy your new language columnist, "Rose Thorne." Do you think she (if, indeed, she is a she) would marry me?

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, however, and in her May column she has committed a truly egregious error. "If you write discrete instead of discreet," she writes, "who is to know what you mean? But that's not the real reason why spelling matters." The reason why? Really, Ms. Thorne! Surely there is an obvious tautological overlap between the reason and why: one of them is clearly redundant. The error (increasingly common, alas!) is an example of what Fowler calls haziness, and is perhaps caused by merging two synonymous constructions. The sentence should read either "But that's not really why spelling matters." In the first amended version it is preferable to omit that, but at least it does no harm and does not repeat semantic information already contained in the reason!

This is a reminder that we all have to keep on our toes when it comes to correct usage. It is a reminder that Ms. Thorne herself drove home to me in the column in question: reading through a document I had just completed, a friend recently pointed out that I had committed the very discrete/discreet error referred to in Ms. Thorne's previous sentence!

Now how many guests do you think we should invite to the reception?