Book excerpt: First published at the age of fifteen and admired for six decades as a poetic virtuoso, Daryl Hine is recognized today as one of the strongest Canadian poets of the twentieth century. His poems, widely cultured and often autobiographical, engage with a remarkable variety of forms, genres, and subjects. With their complex syntax and lavish deployment of metres, tropes, and rhyme, the poems in The Essential Daryl Hine reveal what Pollock, in his illuminating foreword, calls "a matador of art, fighting the toro of death with consummate style." The Essential Poets Series presents the works of Canada’s most celebrated poets in editions that are beautiful, accessible, and affordable. The Essential Daryl Hine is the 12th volume in the series.