SOURCE: Owens, Judith. “Love's Trials.” Canadian Literature, nos. 124-25 (spring-summer 1990): 369-73.

In the following excerpt, Owens comments on the structure, imagery, language, and themes of Final Reckoning.

Irving Layton's Final Reckoning: Poems 1982-1986 marks his 75th birthday and, as the occasion and the title might suggest, the volume asks to be read as a summation, a marshalling of some of Layton's characteristic concerns and themes. Layton remains, as he puts it in the Acknowledgement, an “unsparing critic of his society's cultural values,” sounding indictments—against complacency, self-deception, mediocrity—in voices which range from the wry to the peevish to the scornful to the reflective. He remains, too, the celebrant, rejoicing in passion and creativity, delighting in love. He contemplates the “comedy” of life, with its death masks, its “weavings of weddings and holocausts,” its forebodings of doomsday, striking, by turns, postures of defiance or detachment, even equanimity.

Although...