Irving Layton is not usually considered a “nature poet,” yet his work often features careful observations of nonhuman nature. Jacob Bachinger’s ecocritical reading of a few of Irving Layton\u27s most frequently anthologized poems examines the underappreciated ecopoetic aspect of his work. Bachinger pays specific attention to a recurring theme in many of Layton\u27s best known poems, such as “The Bull Calf” and “A Tall Man Executes a Jig”—the poet’s examination of a dead or dying animal. Layton’s examination of the deaths of these animals exists on a continuum in which the poet moves from an antipastoral to a postpastoral position
