THE WIND HAS WINGS: Poems from Canada

The title is taken from an Eskimo chant (in translation) and all Canada is represented in a wide and welcome variety of verse forms and rhythms. There are fierce thrusts and funny fluff, wry twists and striking images. ""A Threnody"" plays with a press dispatch (""The Ahkoond of Swat is dead""): ""For the Ahkoond I mourn./ Who wouldn't?/ He strove to disregard the message stern,/ But he Ahkoond't./ . . .That Swat's the matter!"" A poem to the ""Sweet Maiden of Passamaquoddy"" makes melodic verse from wild Indian names like Skoodawabskooksis, Miramachi and Passadumkeag. Roy Daniells' ""Noah"" has a very modern dilemma as ""they"" form a committee and cancel his building permit, refusing to believe his warning: ""And then the rain began/ . . . Then deluge universal. The old man/ Arthritic from his years of scorn and toil/ Leaned from the admiral's walk and watched them drown."" Equally adroit is his sonnet ""The Mole""--(it may have been a vole: I can't distinguish)."" ""The Great Lakes Suite"" is a six-in-one tribute to Superior et al. and there are others, long and 'short, of various penetrations. The illustrations vary from brightly colored collages to deceptively simple black-and-white woodcuts. No apparent order but an absorbing arrangement.