George Bowering's advertisements for his own enthusiasms in Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Raincoast $22.95) are as illuminating and exasperating as ever. It's surprising and good to learn his "main male Canadian poetry hero"; was Raymond Souster, but he doesn't elaborate. "The most poetic person I've ever known is Phyllis Webb,"; he states, but we don't learn anything about his relationship to her. He shrewdly praises novelist Ethel Wilson's feigned simplicity as "the most complicated trick of all"; but he limits his celebration of Al Purdy to a lengthy dissertation on the poet's penchant for using the word purple. As much as we're happy to learn that Bowering's poetry buddy Fred Wah is a former high school trumpet player who took the title for his 1981 collection Breathin' my name with a sigh from a line in the song Deep Purple, Bowering naturally assumes the reader knows who the heck Fred Wah is. There's a fair-minded appreciation of Mourning Dove, who also hails from the B.C. Interior, but several chapters aren't indexed and Bowering is overly prejudiced in favour of his acquaintances. Bowering drops his breadcrumbs of cleverness and wit as if writing is a meandering game at which only he can win. It's a willy-nilly compendium. You gotta be in the know, folks. 1-55192-845-0