Choosing the Best Canadian Poetry

Perhaps you have a copy of Margaret Atwood’s New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English on your bookshelf. (Go ahead, blow the dust off it: ah, there it is.) This last real attempt to formulate a canon of English-language Canadian poetry for the common reader was published three decades ago, in 1982. It is true that a handful of classroom anthologies have appeared since then, but they are as full of howling gaps and bewildering misjudgements as a pre-Mercator map of Nouvelle France. A reader in a hotel in the city of Canadian poetry will wake up tomorrow morning not only without a concierge, but without so much as a Baedeker, and will have to rely heavily on a rack of pamphlets advertising local attractions and tourist traps. It is an intolerable situation. A very few clear-eyed poet-critics are out there visiting the museums, sampling the new restaurants and publishing their reports—Carmine Starnino’s book of essays and reviews, A Lover’s...