Love’s Remains

W here the Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, an anthology edited by David Eso and Jeanette Lynes, is more than 400 pages in length. As such it is a hefty collection, a representative and inclusive collection of letters to, for, about and against the absent beloved. It is also, in the best sense of the words, a hybrid monster: an anthology of romantic epistolary narratives by Canadian poets. So many genres are annexed in this classification that it is clear that Eso and Lynes are less interested in cross-referencing a stable body of chronologically accurate amatory narratives than they are in producing a quirky, imaginative history of the desires and devices by which Canadian poetic lovers express passion, discontent, jubilance, mournfulness, ecstasy, penitence—in effect all the varieties of love, what Ivan E. Coyote calls that “tricky bastard.”