Recommended Read: The Poetry of Irving Layton

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There's something so perfectly honest and unassuming about Irving Layton's poetry. It's not flowery or sappy as poetry can sometimes be. Irving Layton was born Israel Pincu Lazarovitch in Romania on March 12, 1912. He immigrated to Montreal, Canada in 1913, where he grew to be a fixture of Canada's literary community.

The Swimmer, Irving Layton

Afternoon foreclosing, see
The swimmer plunges from his raft,
Opening the spray corollas at his act of war -
The snake heads strike
Quickly and are silent.

Emerging see how for a moment,
A brown weed with marvelous bulbs,
He lies immiment upon the water
While light and sound come with a sharp passion
From the gonad sea around the poles
And break in bright cockle-shells about his ears.

He dives, floats, goes under like a thief
Where his blood sings to the tiger shadows
In the scentless greenery that leads him home,
A male salmon down fretted stairways
Through underwater slums....

Stunned by the memory of lost gills
He frames gestures of self-absorption
Upon the skull-like beach;
Observes with instigated eyes
The sun that empties itself upon the water,
And the last wave romping in
To throw its boyhood on the marble sand,

The Swimmer, The Selected Poems, M&S: 2004
His professional accolades include:

• Awarded the Canada Council grant in 1957 for The Improved Binoculars
• First winner of the newly created Governor General’s Award for A Red Carpet for the Sun
• Awarded the Canada Council's Senior Arts Fellowship in 1959
• Nominated for the Nobel Prize by Italy and South Korea

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