Polestar, 380 pp, $29.95, softcover.

One of the first questions most poets get asked when they're outed is, "Does your poetry rhyme?" It's the equivalent of asking gymnasts if they can do the splits. Up until now, most Canadian poets could safely answer such a question with an adamant "No." With the publication of In Fine Form, though, the truth is out: many of us rhyme or use syllabics or acrostics-and, yes, some of us even write haiku.

In the preface to In Fine Form, Canadian poetry grande dame P.K. Page describes how "formal verse can teach us how to read. Like dancing with a professional, we are given no option but to acknowledge the pattern, fall in and become a part of the art." This may very well be true, but what if the professional is a square dancer?

Page's analogy works with this collection because editors Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve have amassed fresh and engaging works that challenge the form's expectations sometimes as much as embrace them. For those still scarred by high school English classes, this is not a collection comprised simply of dead white men; rather, it is a collection of often surprising and vital works from more than 125 Canadians past and present.

For every Governor General's Award-winner represented, there seems to be a promising, just-starting-out poet. Kudos to the editors for taking the time to search out these new voices.

From ballads and blues to ghazals and glosas to sonnets and sestinas, readers are given each form's origin and traditions followed by a series of poems that illustrate that form. In this manner, the editors give us an intimate look at how Canadians have worked toward mastery and/or subversion of the art.

Unlike some anthologies that leave readers questioning the reason for publishing such work-or, to push the P.K. Page analogy, that leave us dancing on broken glass-In Fine Form is an accomplished, much-needed collection that fills a void in the CanLit canon.