Dance with Desire

Alan Thomas is a professor of English at the University of Toronto.

The poetry of Irving Layton has long been associated with the celebration of instinctual, blood-conscious life, particularly sexual life. This concentrated and well-selected collection of 120 love poems drawn from 50 years of writing registers emphatically the assertion of that body of work — that “Love alone provides / the central heating for the world.” Layton plays upon many keys of tone, including those of reproach, chagrin, and self-deprecation, but he is not really a moralist or a cynic about these things and always a robust energy and interest surges beneath the varied poses of these poems, reminding us, or rather persuading us, of the power to be found in the natural spring of sexual life.

Layton has been writing for a long time and the benefits are obvious. He demonstrates the confidence, no matter how outrageous the subject, to draw story, image, rhythm into a structure of words that seeks no apology: long line, short line, anecdote, set-piece — he moves easy and unafraid in all forms, it seems. The classical figures such as Clytemnestra and the Bacchantes whom he works into his everyday conversational pieces are expressions of his confident reach; earlier stages of his own life sometimes provide a context for the foreground and he does not spare himself, the hairy monster. It is possible to find a slack line or a too-obvious echo, but generally these poems succeed through boldness and forcefulness of feeling matched by control. The collection shows Layton at his best.