Thinking of D. J. Enright's poems, one feels no inclination to talk in terms of 'promise,' for they are already fully achieved things in themselves. They face up to whatever judgment one makes of them with no petitions in their hands, no defensive pleas based on age or inexperience or a broken home. [Some Men are Brothers] is divided into four sections—Siam, Berlin, Japan and Displaced—whose titles might suggest that its author is more of a foiled circuitous wanderer than he appears to be. For while he is strongly aware of the exile within him, and who is in all of us, he bridges the gap between him and the ferocious world of the strange, the starved and the brutal with a sympathetic irony which puts himself and it in their places. Sometimes, I guess more and more often, he closes that gap with an understanding compassion that has none of the distance in it that irony implies, and, though the ironic ones are charming and witty and not without a weight of meaning, it is these others that seem to me the most interesting poems in the book. He is not a man to quote in the small space of a review, for he is not notably a phrasemaker. It is the general tone of the poems, that is to say, fundamentally it is the quality of the mind and the sensibility behind them that give them their special flavour. That mind is interested in peasants and politicians, landscapes and loneliness, fans and furores, but always as they matter in everyday living. He recognises their involvement with each other and with him, and these poems therefore are about a real and complex world in which real and complex poems are still possible, as he shows.