A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

This volume contains all the poems of Irving Layton that are worth
reading, and quite a few more. The 100 pages or so featuring the better
poems make it clear that Layton is a major poet, a creator of memorable
and intricately crafted work in a visionary mode. The remainder of the
volume tends to be self-indulgent and glib, a parade of attitudes. Here
and there in the later poems there are flashes of the old fire, the
prophetic strain. The introductory essay by Sam Solecki places Layton
within Canadian literature, showing that he added a cosmopolitan
dimension to it. Layton would be pleased by Solecki’s comparisons of
his work to that of Europeans like Paul Celan and Eugenio Montale.