“A man who collects his poems screws together the boards of his coffin,” introduces rightly Len Gasparini’s Collected Poems (Guernica, $25), for Gasparini views his book as “an open coffin.”

A Collected Poems is a daunting work, for it is the poet taking a long view of his work and trying to position its best showing in the even longer view of posterity.

The Italian-Canadian, Windsor, Ont.-raised, working-class bohemian, intellectual Gasparini is a striking poet to read in this regard — across the theatrically funeral gathering of a Collected — because his work studiously avoids any pretentiousness or ivory tower (poison) ivy.

If these verses are his bones -- entombed metaphorically here -- they are dancing." George Elliott Clarke, the Chronicle Herald