A WILD PECULIAR JOY: SELECTED POEMS 1945-89 Irving Layton Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1989. 315pp, paper, $19.95 ISBN 0-7710-4949-8. CIP Grades 11 and up/Ages 16 and up Reviewed by Pat Bolger. Volume 18 Number 2 1990 March The 75 poems added to the 150 included in the earlier edition of A Wild Peculiar Joy are about evenly divided between those written since 1982 and others from earlier in Layton's fifty years as a poet. The generally chronological arrange­ment allows the reader to trace technical developments in a half century of work in which Layton has continued to celebrate life and love and the tangled relationships within families - and to excoriate cruelty and hypocrisy. Rather surprisingly for one so involved with life, Layton grapples frequently with death, from the poignant "Cat Dying in Autumn" to "Operation Barbarossa," with its startling image of the frozen bodies of soldiers as: black swastikas littering the white plain like jimmies on an enormous frosted cake. One of the last poems in the collec­tion ends with an unexpectedly gentle response to his own mortality: our flesh, Dante, one day will be such golden dust as a storyless wind stirs in an empty vault. Like the other titles in the "Modern Canadian Poets" series, this is hand­somely produced, although the cover art is unappealing. This extremely gener­ous selection of work from Layton's long career will fulfill the needs of senior students and teachers of English. Recommended. Pat Bolger, Renfrew, Ont.