[In the following review, Lucas provides an unfavorable assessment of Sillitoe's Collected Poems.]

In the preface to this ample volume, [Collected Poems,] Alan Sillitoe explains that it contains fewer than half the poems he has published during his writing career. “Fat and gristle,” he calls the work he has discarded, adding that what he has chosen to include has been subjected to “extreme revision” and represents “the meat” of his achievement as a poet. It also “displays the emotional history” of Sillitoe's “heart and soul.” I don't complain of such unguarded candour, however old-hat the phrasing may seem to be; nor is there reason to doubt that the pruning knife has been hard at work. What is to be regretted is that the cutting and re-writing haven't done much for the candour. Too many of these poems are muffled by dead language, inert rhythms and pointless stanza divisions, as though Sillitoe is determined to come on as a “poet,” but has chosen to leave behind the virtues that make him at his best a valuable writer of fiction.

His first verse collection, The Rats, was written, he says, while he was working on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But where, in the poems, can you find any evidence of the ear for local speech, the vivid understanding of particular lives, that distinguish his novel? “The wasteland that seemed to Mr Eliot death / Nurtured me with passion, life and breath.” Admittedly, the lines that follow these try to itemize how and why “The wasteland was my library and college,” but they do so with such clumsy, reach-me-down vocabulary and rhymes that they quite undermine the claims the poet hopes to make for his unsentimental education. This is not so much candour as schlock.

Matters improve when he moves away from Nottingham, although he never shakes off the habit of slovenly writing. “A broad and solid oak exploded / Split by mystery and shock / Broken like bread / Like a flower shaken.” Exploded and split? Broken and shaken? It's odd that Sillitoe should have a thing about trees and woods—several poems celebrate or “deal” with them—when he has so little regard for how they actually look or for their histories or the space they occupy. But then Sillitoe the poet hasn't much sense of any of these things. Perhaps for this reason one of the most interesting of his poems, called “Lancaster,” has for subject the displaced and displacing experience of being taken for a （peacetime） flight in a Second World War bomber:

the botch of Leicester
Railways of Rugby, the sandstone of Oxford
The peace of Abingdon and the first view of
the Thames,
Canals and rivers of new reality, calico
tablecloth
Hiding all in me, unseen from my chosen
seat.

The language is at best journalistic, but the sense of not belonging. “My place forever looking down and in,” comes across as near to the writer's “heart and soul.”

Unfortunately, the looking seldom amounts to more than tepid adjective-noun constructions. Even the poems Sillitoe has selected from Tides and Stone Walls offer very little by way of imagistic sharpness, and this is in spite of the fact that they were originally written to accompany work by the photographer Victor Bowley. “It's what the tide reveals / When it huffs and leaves / That means so much.” Maybe, but given that we're never told what in fact is revealed, we have to take the claim on trust. Perhaps Sillitoe felt he couldn't and/or shouldn't try to compete with the photographs, and this is entirely understandable. But the sad truth is that left to themselves the poems drop into an incoherent mutter. “Bombs are the enemies of bricks”; “Blood makes history, / And desolation / A winter's day.” Reading these and other poems that between them make up Sillitoe's Collected, you come to feel that it's the product of someone endlessly ill at ease with a medium he nevertheless cannot bring himself to do without.