SOURCE: Ravvin, Norman. “Poet & Polis.” Canadian Literature, nos. 138-39 (fall-winter 1993): 150-51.

In the following review, Ravvin questions why Dance with Desire, a collection with almost the same contents as a volume released earlier, was published as a separate work. Ravvin also challenges the classification of Layton's poems as love poetry, believing the hostile elements in the poetry to push even the widest boundaries of the genre.

Irving Layton's early volumes—angry, incendiary books all—could not have prepared us for the tendency in recent years to collect Layton as a love poet. It is almost as if there is a movement afoot to replace our image of the man as purveyor of Nietzschean gestures condemning cultural hypocrisy and anti-semitic pretension, with the image of the poet aging randily, an ever-fixated sexual adventurer. The latter persona is played to the hilt in Dance with Desire: Selected Love Poems. The...