cover image Fornalutx

Fornalutx

Irving Layton. Institute for Research on Public Policy, $95 (208pp) ISBN 978-0-7735-0952-8

In an overlong introduction, Trehearne stresses the diversity in this six-decade retrospective of an esteemed Canadian poet's work. But the poems that follow seem strikingly similar: terse, sardonic, prosaic, somewhat didactic. Whether writing about Nazis or his next-door neighbors, Layton ( The Selected Poems of Irving Layton ) delights in presenting the grotesque elements of human nature: ``Hurrah for the elephant / who trampled his trainer to death.'' His chauvinistic depictions of women rival those of Charles Bukowski. Aging, he becomes more ornery than insightful. The poems are arranged thematically; those that open the book are vacantly outer-directed, yet paradoxically they offer a greater glimpse of sensitivity than more personal poems in the later pages. A poem ironically titled ``Whom I Write For'' begins: ``When reading me, I want you to feel / as if I had ripped your skin off; / or gouged out your eyes with my fingers . . . '' In the poem immediately following this, we are privy to the source of his negativity: ``All the noble lines of poets / did not make Hiroshima and Belsen / not to happen, / nor will they keep back the coming holocaust.'' In the arrangement of this volume, such a revelation comes too late. (Oct.)