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Carmine Starnino has been making a name for himself as a poet, editor and critic for over a dozen years. While his tenure as editor of Signal Editions has been outstanding, and his own poetry has been warmly received since his first collection was published in 1997, it is as a critic that he has so far made his most memorable marks on the literary world. But the publication of his latest collection of poems This Way Out raises the question: Is this as it should be?

It might be difficult for Starnino's poetry to wiggle out from under the hard-faced elephant of his critical persona. He's cultivated a reputation as a tenacious provocateur and defender of formalist orthodoxy, setting himself against those subversive adepts of the avant garde and their insidious lack of respect for tradition.

• This Way Out, by Carmine Starnino, Gaspereau Press, 78 pages, $18.95

Early on, however, Starnino had developed a reputation for viciousness in his book reviews. In a recent issue of The New Quarterly, he explained why: “When you first start [writing reviews] – and this is true and if people deny it they're lying – you want to hurt people.” He later clarifies his current critical objectives; he's no longer interested in hurting people, but rather “in hurting... ideas. Hurting trends. Hurting ways of thinking.” You'd be forgiven for finding this a surprisingly narrow and reactionary approach to poetics, but how does such stringent critical dogma assert itself in Starnino's latest book of poems?

Not surprisingly, Starnino is especially skillful in the deployment of rhyme, metre, and the other formal elements of verse. When it comes to craft, he puts his creative money where his critical mouth is. Our Butcher is a flawlessly executed ballad of the meatpacker's arts rife with serious wordplay and a glut of onomatopoeia that evokes the snapping of bones and rending of flesh. Here, the excellence of Starnino's enjambment, the infectious bounce and thwack of his lines, and his canny ability to find the mots justes (e.g. crewelworked, grosgrained, disinter) to animate his gory theme all indicate a craftsmanship of profound dexterity. See for yourself: “I could bone up, be the right man for that one-man job, / hang by its hocks a rabbit shucked from the jacket / of its black-bristled fur and still talking in twitches.”

Throughout the collection, and again not surprisingly, the work of Starnino the formalist is on impressive display. A few poems do drag ponderously through their clockwork motions, for example a sleepy suite of sonnets called Nine from Rome . But the title poem, which explores notions of place and belonging, sings with alliteration, adroit internal rhymes, and the chug-a-lugging cadence of a smooth rolling locomotive of language on a sensory-rich tour of the poet's own Montreal neighbourhood.

What is surprising is how much more free-wheeling and playful Starnino the poet seems to be than Starnino the critic. For example, the poem Doge's Dungeon brilliantly uses this emoticon (:-o) as a kind of conceptual end-rhyme with the word “terror.” And the poem Heavenography is a stream-of-consciousness prose poem about “working-class” clouds. It's a rollicking, surrealist vaudeville of a poem that has more in common with experimentalist sensibilities than Starnino the critic might like to admit, but its jazzy freeform lightheartedness suits the poet so well that we should all hope he'll write more like it soon.

I like this version of Carmine Starnino best: the good-natured poet, full of beans, approaching his aesthetics with an air of carefree mischief. It's so refreshing, one has to wonder what in the world that other Carmine Starnino – the starchy and strait-laced critic, the one bent on “hurting ideas” – would make of it all.

Paul Vermeersch is a poet and editor. His fourth collection of poems will be published in 2010.