Praise for From Zero to One:
His poems display a ready wit and frequent flights of fancy. Imaginative, almost surreal fugues are characteristic of longer poems that appear in From Zero to One: an automatic record player begins to play records for its own enjoyment; the ghost of a dead wife continues to haunt the family home; office-workers take refuge in a secret room that seems to exist in another dimension; and a message from outer space proves to be either nonsense or higher sense.
- John Robert Colombo, in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, Toronto, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1983
If Robert Zend were writing in English or French, he would be recognized as one of Canada's leading poets. But because he writes his witty, inventive, resourceful and extremely imaginative poems in his native language, he is known only to a handful of Canadians. I have translated his poems into English to remedy this sad situation.
- John Robert Colombo, translator of the collection (on the book jacket)