[In the following review, Howes contends that Sillitoe focuses too much on specifics and not enough on life's universalities in the poems of Love in the Environs of Voronezh.]

George Bernard Shaw once subdivided a group of his plays into “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant.” By almost anyone's critical standards, Alan Sillitoe's poems, Love in the Environs of Voronezh, would be classed as Poems Unpleasant.

Mr. Sillitoe employs an elliptical style, knotty, hard to unravel, like the speech of people who grudge their words and spit them out sparingly. His poems are filled with implicit violence: with knives, bullets, bombs, with verbs like “to savage,” “to razor,” “to rifle out and kill.” His images seem to be forcibly held together by some subjective logic of the poet's own—a logic the reader can grasp only in subjective flashes of intuition. Cataclysm seems always to impend, as the images threaten to pull apart and leave us face to face with chaos.

Mr. Sillitoe is fascinated with the opposition of fire and ice. Characteristically he offers

midnight-midday frostbitten forest fires
Burning into the dust and honeymilk.
And eating even the iron through.

And again,

a fire engine races through
A freak snowstorm …
Will it skid into oblivion …
And leave only the snow of heaven
To put all fires out?

With Sillitoe one feels the impulse to say extravagant things, to squander words without any reserve of credit to back them up. He addresses himself, in one poem, to a “star that beats in me like a fish.” In another, he confides, “I am a tree whose roots destroy me.” He lullabies a baby with the words, “Goodnight sweet baby, sleep / Safe in the uplands of oblivion / Beyond the iced bite of the moon.”

In the present collection, his third book of poetry, there are poems about the ways of love, mainly destructive; poems about animals, about the exploration of space, poems of withdrawal from, and occasionally return to, the world, poems about identity, dreams, survival.

Some deal with travel, inspired by a journey Mr. Sillitoe made to the Soviet Union. But whether they explore the world outside or within the poet scarcely matters, for both groups are marked and marred by the poet's preoccupation with the bizarre. The Eurasian landscape through which he moves becomes merely another symbol for his inner journey.

Black ice smoulders all around …
Ninety degrees of bitterness preserve
Mosquito eggs. There is death
From fire but not by ice
As the list of winter
Pulls into the mitten of the sun.

Alan Sillitoe is an English novelist of considerable reputation. Two of his books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, have provided the bases of films. These are widely admitted for their sensitive depictions of English working-class life. Mr. Sillitoe has worked in Majorca under the direction of the poet and novelist, Robert Graves, and there is no question about his powers of language, or his power to write angry, tortured poems, filled with images of rejection and negation.

Furthermore, great art can be made from such materials: witness Othello, the satires of Swift and Pope, and many of the poems of Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Edwin Arlington Robinson. But for art there must be objectivity and aesthetic distance; there must be a sense of the larger life of humanity going on about its business, “eating,” as W. H. Auden has put it, “or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

Only fleetingly, as in the title poem, a celebration of a city rebuilt from its ashes, does Mr. Sillitoe show us that he glimpses life's continuities. For the most part he seems to be standing up too close to his canvas either to see it steadily or to see it whole.