Dance with Desire

'Don't let the title fool you; this is not a book of romantic bric-a-brac, a Valentine's Day gift to be lightly given and lightly forgotten. Irving Layton's career was based on an unflinching attention to everything he could discover about the human character, including its less savoury aspects. In the poems of Dance with Desire chosen from across the span of his long career, Layton styles himself as a 20th-century Catullus, loving and hating with equal glee, given to passionate excesses and epigrammatic precision, utterly unconcerned with sweet nothings or political correctness. Layton is often charged with being too verbose, with having published far too many substandard poems, and having let his verse grow slack as he grew older. These are all valid criticisms, but they don't really apply to Dance with Desire since its very existence depends upon the excesses, embarrassments, and foolishness of the unstifled love that Layton celebrates.'

Irving Layton (Israel Lazarovitch) was born March 12, 1912 in Tirgu Neamt, Romania. Layton came to Montreal with his family before he was one. He attained a BSc in agriculture at Macdonald College in 1939. Following a stint in the Canadian Army, he did graduate work in political science at McGill. A poet, short-story writer, and essayist, Layton is perhaps the most well-known of the Montreal poets, a group of young poets who engaged in a battle against romanticism in poetry in the 1940's. Layton has published many poetry collections, including A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959) which won the Governor General's Award. Layton was poet-in-residence at various Canadian universities and a professor of English at York University 1969-78. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1981.

Irving Layton died in 2006.