CANADIAN WRITERS AND THEIR WORKS. POETRY SERIES: VOLUME FIVE. Edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto, ECW Press, cl985. 329pp. cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-920802-90-7. CIP CANADIAN WRITERS AND THEIR WORKS. POETRY SERIES: VOLUME NINE. Edited by Robert Lecker, Jack David, and Ellen Quigley. Toronto, ECW Press, c 1985. 288pp, cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-920802-47-8. CIP Grade 12 and up Reviewed by Alan Thomas Volume 14 Number 4 1986 July Here are another two volumes in an excellent series of reference works for Canadian literature. This pair deals with important figures in successive and overlapping generations of modern poetry in this country. Volume five gives us that generation that came of age in the Thirties and Forties as immediate heirs of the great modernists. There are some legendary names here, familiar from many a grade school anthology: Earle Birney, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Raymond Souster, and Miriam Waddington. The general editor, George Woodcock, terms this group neo-modernist to distinguish them from the following group he calls post-modernist. These are treated in Volume nine and comprise Margaret Atwood, D.G. Jones, Patrick Lane, Dennis Lee, and Gwendolen MacEwen. Woodcock's broad categorizing is not as important as the individual and thorough essays by specialists on each poet, essays that append useful bibliographies. These provide excellent starting-points for high-school and college students setting out on assignments. The frame for these critical essays is uniform: life, literary tradition, critical response, and discussion of the poetry itself. This guarantees that there will always be some biography, some critical history, etc., but naturally the emphases vary. Jean Mallinson's handling of Margaret Atwood, for instance, is light on biography, but full and detailed in its development of ideas about the poetry; on the other hand. Wynne Francis provides a splendid pocket biography of Irving Laylon that spills over into her critical discussion of the poetry. Each volume contains an index of titles and names. Alan Thomas, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont.