A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems 1945-82

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Since 1945 Irving Layton has established himself as Canada’s best-known (and, many would claim, best) contemporary poet, and has published some 40 volumes of verse, including several Collected or Selected Poems. This particular selection is remarkable not merely because it is the most up to date but because of the method by which the selections were made. Most readers would agree that Layton has published too much and is not necessarily the best critic of his own work. In the past he has printed a good many poems that more careful (Layton might say, weakly cautious) poets would have quickly consigned to the waste-paper basket. In this selection Layton was assisted by Dennis Lee, the poet and highly respected editor and advisor; furthermore, critic Wynne Francis and poet-critics Eli Mandel and Seymour Mayne also offered advice.

The result is, I think, admirable. Where the effect of previous volumes was too often dissipated by the presence of ephemeral squibs, a few tasteless insults, and more generally inferior work, here we are offered not a refinement — Layton would properly object to the word — but the result of a careful winnowing. We can see now that his anger, his delight at shocking those ready to be shocked, is at one with his whole, essentially cohering, attitude to life, not an addendum in the interests of publicity and self-display. Layton is a complex figure, acutely conscious of the many directions in which human beings are pulled — or pull themselves. As he notes in one poem:

My heart is torn apart

by love and loathing, gratitude and disgust,

by reverence and rage.

And in these poems he gives us the whole man. What makes Layton so important is his extraordinary variety of language, and the control of tone that can move within a line or two from iconoclastic rage to tender lyricism. We find here that dazzling memorableness of phrase and, above all, a keen and undeceived eye recording with firmness and integrity the combination of joy and barbarousness that characterizes our world. At his best Layton is in a class of his own, and this selection does him justice.