Fifty-four periodicals submitted their 2008 issues to A.F. Moritz, editor of this second poetry anthology in the Best Canadian series. When Moritz was awarded the 2009 Griffin prize, the judges’ citation referred to “his formal grace”—an aesthetic which clearly underlies his choices. Of the magazines known for publishing edgier work, only PRECIPICe even makes the long list of also-rans. Yet any collection of poems must, perforce, submit to the editor’s idea of excellence, and in this type of anthology, twice-vetted.

Moritz’s introduction, “Canadian Poetry Today,” is 17 pages long. Thus he has room to go beyond introducing the poems in the book and muses on poetry itself, using as springboard Dave Margoshes’s “Becoming a Writer,” with authorizing quotations from Octavio Paz and Czeslaw Milosz. When he does eventually talk about The Best Canadian Poetry, he comments, “you will see as you read the poems of this anthology that its [Canadian poetry] adventures are multiple.” If poems outside Moritz’s personal aesthetic are understandably absent, the chosen fifty, presented alphabetically from Atwood to Zwicky, are in no way devoid of delights, and my notes record many remarkable moments.

Form itself has a presence: the late P.K. Page’s “Coal and Roses: A Triple Glosa”; ballads by Anita Lahey and Matt Rader; prose poems by Eric Miller, Meredith Quartermain and Matthew Tierney. There is pastiche, as echoes of Revelations brilliantly structure John Terpstra’s “The Highway That Became a Footpath”—even to its biblically-cadenced redundancies.

And the highway-that-became-a-footpath
led past the longhouse raised
during the same resistance, down in the valley,
for it still existed (both longhouse and valley existed
still)
and other longhouses

Canada is many places, from Evelyn Lau’s “Night Market” in Richmond, BC, to Ken Babcock’s “Donkey Sanctuary” near Guelph, ON. There are also poems that speak of elsewhere—David O’Meara’s “Café in Bodrum,” Cora Siré’s “Before Leaving Hué,” and Changmin Yuan’s “Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River”—whose “song is no more than a foam of silence[.]” Place is also found in the elsewhen—Carmine Starnino in ancient Rome with “Pugnax Gives Notice”; and the (re)constructed reminiscence of a more recent past in Ricardo Sternberg’s account of love on a commune, “New Canaan,” in which the persona had to meditate before breakfast, and “his loquacious stomach growled/ in such long, drawn out sentences/ he took to calling it Cicero[.]”

In a section called “Poem Notes & Commentaries,” readers are provided with insights on how the poems came to be. Anne Compton’s “Even Now” considers aging. It was prompted, she explains, by her three-year-old grandson’s question, “Granny Anne, are you old?” Such explanations are useful to students of poetry, because they will learn that a poem’s trigger does not have to be in the poem itself. But can be, as in Robyn Sarah’s “Echoes in November” which concludes with its inspiration, “the ghost of a rose/ in the core of a carrot.”

Maxianne Berger is the author of Dismantled Secrets (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008).