Dance with Desire

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

It’s always a pleasure to be able to reread—and to
rediscover—Irving Layton’s poetry in new collections, and this
latest offering is certainly no exception. The selections in the new
Dance with Desire, originally edited by Russell Brown with Irving
Layton, now appear with additional poems selected by John Metcalf, a
foreword by Layton, and charcoal sketches by Richard Gorman.

Comprising a total of 124 poems, most of them gathered from 30 previous
books published over a period of 35 years, this newest selection of
Layton’s love poetry not only attests once again to the poet’s
prolific and singular imagination, but also presents an interesting and
enlightening chronological development from “To the Girls of My
Graduating Class” of 1953 to the more mature and insightful offerings
of the middle to late 1980s.

According to the foreword, Layton wrote his first love poem for his
Grade 6 teacher (to whom the book is dedicated) and has since written
“two or three hundred” more. What we have here, then, is perhaps not
quite half of all the love poems he has written to date, and by and
large the more powerful and successful ones. They all bristle with the
unbridled passion, the energy, the intensity, the honesty, and the
deeply felt emotional expression with which Layton made himself a name
early on in his career, and with which he still dazzles and compels the
reader today. As always, Layton’s unmitigated admiration for the
opposite sex—and for womanhood as a whole—shines through his
explorations, his odes, his eulogies, while the eroticism of his more
explicit lines and poems builds into crescendos as he sings the praises
of the women in his life—real and imaginary, distant and near, loved
and merely admired from afar.