CANADA`S NEED for poetry that expresses our national qualities and aspirations was articulated by Keith Spicer last year. Alas, he did not quote from Abraham Moses Klein. After a winter of constitutional soulsearching, this edition of A. M. Klein: Complete Poems is a welcome event. These poems capture our country, our culture, and our history in language so passionate that it soars. Klein`s treatment of Canada`s landscape, seasons, and regionalism is as apt today as when he penned these poems in the period from 1926 to 1955. Klein was born in Montreal in 1909. After an orthodox Jewish upbringing, he studied arts at McGill University and law at the Universite de Montreal. Much of his early verse dealt with Jewish subjects, especially the essence of religious faith and the difficulty of reconciling the existence of injustice in a universe created by a -supposedly-beneficent God. The need for tolerance and moral commitment was a recurring theme. Klein`s concern with Jewish self definition, and its relation to the cohesion that Jews felt as a consequence of being discriminated against, afforded him some remarkable insights when he moved on to more general Canadian themes in the 1940s. A new awareness of modernism, the influence of writers such as P. K. Page, Frank Scott, and Patrick Anderson, and a reappraisal of the social role of the poet changed Klein. The Rocking Chair and Other Poems (1948), which won the Governor General`s Award for Poetry, was seminal. In it he left his former cultural preoccupations behind and explored broader Quebecois and Canadian concerns. He presented parallels between the Jewish community and French-Canadian society: each group was self-contained, and had deep religious roots and a sense of persecution. Klein`s capacity to embrace past and present, his infusions of irony and affection, and his command of language give his later work remarkable maturity and artistry. Daily life in Quebec is represented by commonplace objects: for example, the habitant`s traditional rocking chair becomes the symbol for a people and its values. Rituals such as maple-sugaring, political meetings, and the St. Jean Baptiste parade create cohesion. The traditional seigneurial society is gone, but old images remain. "0 who can measure the potency of symbols?" he asks, as he conjures up "The Beaver," "Krieghoff Calligrammes," and "Snowshoers." Even mundane objects like "The Grain Elevator" are used to symbolize collective needs and the demands of a resource economy. In a few experimental poems, Klein intermixes French and English sounds - a bilingual compromise. While there is an astounding capacity for synthesis in The Rocking Chair, some of the tensions that are part of the Canadian situation prove to be irresolveable. After questioning individual faith, Klein moves on to ponder the nation`s faith in itself. In a moving poem called "The Provinces," after describing regional diversity, he asks what is "the single thing that makes them one, if one": Yet where shall one find it? In their history the cairn of cannonball on the public square? Their talk, their jealous double-talk? Or in the whim and weather of a geography curling in drifts about the forty-ninth? Zailig Pollock`s annotations much enhance the experience of reading this two-volume set, which is an important addition to the University of Toronto Press series of Klein`s collected works. Unfortunately, the Complete Poems is so expensive that many readers will be unable to afford it. A paperback edition of The Rocking Chair would make it possible for many more of us to appreciate this wonderful part of our cultural legacy.