Essential Words: An Anthology of Jewish Canadian Poetry

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

This large, well-produced book seeks to provide a fairly comprehensive selection of modern Canadian Jewish poetry. The reader would be well advised to skip Seymour Mayne’s introduction, marred by overgeneralization, and go to the poems.

The best-known poets — Cohen, Klein, Layton, Mandel, Waddington, and Wayman — are well represented, and no such collection would be viable without them. Their work, however, is easily accessible elsewhere; so it is on the poetry of lesser-known figures that Essential Words must be judged. Avi Boxer, Gertrude Katz, Joseph Sherman, the superb Sharon Nelson — all explore their roots with bravery and craft. Phyllis Gottlieb and Joe Rosenblatt delight in word-play. Excellent work is also presented by the late poets Stanley Cooperman and Steve Smith.

Younger poets fare less well. Susan Glickman’s tired and weak poem shows her much more preoccupied with being A Woman. Self-indulgence and lack of craft are also evident in poems by Artie Gold, Janis Rapaport, Nancy-Gay Rotstein, and Kenneth Sherman. On the whole, however, Essential Words (for all its pretentious title) is a book well worth buying, studying, getting angry and sad with, and finally rejoicing over.