A collection of fourteen poems about animals, from a laughing rooster and a joyous whale to a proud peacock and a cat named Runcible.

A new format reprint of one hundred poems. potency and tenderness The gratifying thing about reading his work now is that it grows with you. The older I get the more the poems reveal. I'm knocked out by the richness, the resonance, the generosity, the hard intelligence, the clarity, the passion, and above all else, the great, great aching tenderness, which remains very much a part of who he is and he means to me. Leonard Cohen a poetic mind of genuine dignity and power an unobstrusive mastery of technique. Northrop Frye When I first clapped my eyes on the poems of Irving Layton I let out a yell of joy With his vigour and abilities, who shall not say that Canada will not have produced one of the West's most famous poets? William Carlos Williams

`Don't let the title fool you; this is not a book of romanticDance 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.'