THE BEST ENGLISH teacher I ever had took the mannered couplets of the Augustan satirists and made sense (and entertainment) of them for us with the analogy of birds` feathers: Horace ruffled them and Juvenal ripped them out. A confusion about the difference is manifest in Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verse (Key Porter, 128 pages, $16.95 cloth), a title that seems to suggest the subtlety of the barb is indistinguishable from the crude violence of venom. Happily, the authors of the more than 100 odes, poems, diatribes, and squibs collected here under the imprimatur of Margaret Atwood`s foreword suffer no confusion about their methodology; most go for the jugular with varying degrees of wit and polish, but with a surprisingly vigorous relish and partisanship, Barbed Lyres is the outcome of a competition sponsored by This Magazine, and contains, as well as the winners and highly commendeds, verses by 25 professional or "high-profile` people, including Bob Rae, Robertson Davies, and Pierre Berton. There`s a lot of Meech and Mulroney or course, with attendant concerns about the relationships between anglophone and francophone Canada; some fairly severe examinations of our greedy and reckless destruction of wildlife and wild places; and frequent excursions into the hinterland of personalities, relationships, and "the Canadian way," whatever that is. The verses are patchy, both technically and in terms of content, but they are also funny, clever, often passionate, and occasionally masterly. And what a gauge of the current climate in the country they are.