Nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, Irving Layton is Canada's most dynamic, controversial, and outspoken poet. His prolific verse reveals his Judaic heritage, his love of women, and his fury and fever for life. This volume of 150 poems, which takes its title from the opening poem, is a new selection from Layton's work between 1928 and 1990, chosen to give a complete picture of the poet his vision, tone, celebration, attack, defence, disharmony, and "the external dualisms of imaginative desire and bitter reality." These are the poems for which Layton will be remembered.