[In the following excerpt, Hayman provides a positive assessment of The Way of a World.]

Though American critics have recognised the importance of Charles Tomlinson's achievement, it is still generally underrated in this country and almost without exception, reviews of his new book The Way of a World have been condescending, if not unfavourable. Just as an actor gets type-cast, a poet in our literary climate is all too liable to go on being discussed in the same terms that are applied to him in his first set of reviews. "Painterly," "visual," "microscopic"—the words were relevant to Tomlinson's 1955 collection The Necklace, but while he is no less precise an observer than he was, he has developed so much since then that to go on thudding out the same adjectives is to tell a small part of the truth.

The position he took in The Necklace is defined in its first two lines:

Reality is to be sought, not in concrete,
But in space made articulate

In the poems which follow and in his second book Seeing is Believing, the basic assumption is that clarity of vision is the prerequisite for an adequate grasp on reality. "When the truth is not good enough/We exaggerate. " The poems record and advocate the discovery and practice of a discipline by which distortion can be avoided. The poems observe not only the surfaces of things, but the play of light and shade in the spaces between them. In "More Foreign Cities" the lit space becomes as solid as the stone masses. But even these early poems are not narrowly "visual." They are constantly enlisting the other senses to refine and articulate the visual impressions.

Warm flute on the cold snow
Lays amber in sound.

Or:

The girls (white as their prayer-books) are released,
Rustle in lavender and thyme
From incense back to houses where
Their white pianos cool each thirsty square.

This is poetry for all the senses, but its concern is to wake them up, not to put them to sleep with facile gratification. To become aware of a tree or a field or a house, to avoid the danger of seeing it as a reflection or extension of ourselves, we must empty our minds of everything else, imitating the patience and stillness of stone. If there seems to be a battle going on between the wind and the trees, we can only taste the confusion if we hold back from emulating it. It is characteristic of these two volumes that they hardly ever employ the first person, except inside quotation marks.

Instead of asserting himself subjectively, Tomlinson uses himself as a medium through which he realises natural life more vividly than any poet since Hopkins. No one writing today is more sensitive than Tomlinson to the turn of the seasons and though he most often opts for a winter setting, his attitude of reverent gratitude in face of the natural landscape which surrounds us and his keen awareness of the processes of self-renewal which are constantly and copiously at work in it put him emotionally at the antipodes of Beckett and the writers whose preoccupations are one-sidedly with decay, the gradual failing of the individual body's faculties.

The people in Tomlinson's next book, A Peopled Landscape, are integral parts of the landscape and one of the poems in American Scenes centres on the legend of an old Indian Chief transformed by death into a mountain. Featured in the lighter poems in this book are a New Mexican captured by the Apaches and trained by them to steal, a bagpipe-playing Jew and a converted Indian Chief—characters comically at odds with their environment. But it is only in The Way of a World that the assertion of the human will comes into the foreground of the serious poems. "Assassin" is by far the most dramatic poem Tomlinson has yet written: he projects himself into the consciousness of the Stalinist agent who killed Trotsky, recreating it almost as if it were a landscape, but subtly pinpointing the man's awareness of the passing moments before and after the murder, his reaction to the blood which he had steeled himself to expect and the details which catch him by surprise—Trotsky's animal cry and the papers snowing from his desk to the floor.

The opening poem "Swimming Chenango Lake" sets the tone and focus of the book. Knowing the approaching winter will soon have made the water too cold, the man hesitates on the brink and then

Surely this could hardly be bettered either as a description of a body moving in water or as an allegorical picture of an individual testing his environment, striking up an impermanent relationship with it. It tolerates his aggression, embraces him frigidly, circumscribes his liberty, partly gives him a sense of identity, partly takes it away.

This is only a beginning. In "Prometheus" Tomlinson not only sets up a more complex interrelationship between the visual, aural, and tactual references than before, but he develops a new rhythm, no less subtle but less reticent, more committed than in the earlier poems. Altogether this is a less private voice, a controlled rhetoric which claims and commands a wider space, ranges over a more impressive variety of tones than ever before.

Inevitably there is some loss of precision and economy. "Tears" is too nearly a repetition of "gnaws" and the verbs and images in the last sentence could have been interrelated better. But in "Night Transfigured" the description of the nettles illuminated by torchlight is superb in its richness and exactness of descriptive detail. The title poem seizes with extraordinary clarity on a remembering mind groping for and grasping a particular movement of the wind, while "Descartes and the Stove," equally admirable in its description, is most valuable for the complex outside the mind.

I have still said nothing of the prose poems, which are uneven but quite brilliant at their best, or of the short line poems like "Before the Dance," which skilfully uses its impatient rhythm to generate the suspense of the moment before the beginning of the Indian dance at Zuni. Somehow the poem contrives a pre-echo of the sound which is not yet in the air.