IT`S STRANGE TO think that a poet can be hailed as one of the finest of her generation, and then be all but forgotten within a few decades of her death. Such was the fate of Anne Wilkinson, who died in 1961 at the age of 50; in the last 10 years of her life she published a memoir, a children`s book, and two volumes of poetry, which were praised by such notables as A. J. M. Smith and Desmond Pacey The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson and a Prose Memoir (Exile Editions, 212 pages, $19.95 paper), the republication of a volume that first appeared in 1968 under Smith`s editorship, signals a revival of interest in her work. For me, Wilkinson`s poetry is a welcome discovery; less so her memoir, "Four Corners of My World," though its evocation of her upbringing in an affluent Southern Ontario family is of biographical interest. "Touch everything available / To consciousness," Wilkinson wrote in "Letter to My Children: Postscript" Her intense identification with the natural world gave rise to a poetry that is deeply sensuous, both in its sound and its imagery. Many poems playfully echo nursery rhymes or take sly delight in punning, sometimes for grim purposes - much of her later work is preoccupied with death and loss. Inevitably, some of The Poetry of Anne Wilkinson seems dated, but there`s a fierce hereness that occasionally blazes through, as in "Poem in three par&`: The stone in my hand IS my hand And stamped with tracings of A once greenblooded frond, Is here, is gone, will come, Was fire, and green, and water, Will be wind.