[Collected Poems] is a severely pruned collection of poems written by Enright between 1953 and now. What picture of the poet emerges from them? Academic, humanist, traveller. (p. 85)

But most of all a single scene comes to mind. The poet is at his desk in some far-flung corner of south-east Asia. It is night, so the desk lamp is switched on. The poet continues to write, as insects gather under the lamp. Then the lizards come and eat the insects. The insects think the poet is punishing them by feeding them to a spring-jawed dragon. That is the scenario of 'The faithful'. It ends:

             It isn't difficult to be a god.
             You hang your lantern out,
             Sink yourself in your own concerns
             And leave the rest to the faithful.
                                    (pp. 85-6)

And that is a large part of Enright's theme. It isn't difficult to be a god. But what about being a just god, with all the moral casuistries to try to make intelligible? After all, in the Western tradition, that's what a god is expected to do—which is something different from administering arbitrary punishment and rewards. In point of fact, Enright is not a god and his lamp is not a spring-jawed dragon. But he has hung his lantern out, he has sunk himself in his own concerns, and it can fairly be said that it's up to the faithful to interpret that as they please—or don't please. In other words, it's not difficult to have yourself taken for a god—by somebody. Prime Ministers do, cultural officials do, even the gulli-gulli man does—by his chicken. If he is not a god, he is at least 'the greatest of beings'. But there is an exception. And that is the poets. They are not gods. They have to work from the opposite end of the theological-cultural spectrum. As Enright says in 'Cultural freedom', 'You need defeat's sour / Fuel for poetry. / Its motive power / Is powerlessness.'

Powerlessness, for example, to prevent the deaths of children—which must be to the God in the sky what the deaths of ants are to the god at the typist's desk [in 'Hands off, foreign devil'], or students to unscrupulous Oriental politicians [in 'Prime Minister']. Much of the Collected Poems reads like a gloss on the famous words Ivan Karamazov spoke to his brother Alyosha: 'If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have the children to do with it?' (p. 86)

But it happens. Children die in their tens of thousands, and nowhere better to witness it than among the Asian poor. One of the very first poems in the book is entitled 'On the death of a child', followed by the better, because more tersely descriptive, poem from Enright's second volume, 'The short life of Kazuo Yamomoto'. Kazuo, who 'wanted to die because of a headache', a headache shared, in the metaphorical sense (which makes all the difference) by 'the great ones', the politicians, the gods, grappling with notions of Sovereignty and Subjection. (pp. 86-7)

Unusual for a poet these days to have got his priorities right: gods, poets, the deaths of little children. In other words suffering, responsibility for suffering, and what is to be done about it, how one is to write about it. So far as the poet is concerned, the most important thing is not to confuse pity as a response to all this with pity as a subject to write about…. [Where poems] are good they are salutary reminders of the relativity of suffering, which can sound harsh, uncharitable. The poem from The Terrible Shears, for example, about a schoolgirl run over by a bus, having her leg amputated but passing her exams and getting married. Not a bad life, in the poet's judgement. No secret police dragging you out of bed in the middle of the night, no children stabbed or having their brains dashed out, no one starving to death. (p. 87)

So it isn't difficult to be a god, but it's just as easy to be the victim of a god. Probably we are all both at once from time to time in our lives. The almost infinite gradation from ants to angels is bound to place us in the power of some strange being, and make us seem like some strange being to someone in our power. And when we drop out of the chain, we are soon replaced, our absence not noticed for long—as Enright reflects on leaving one of many houses he has occupied in Thailand or Singapore….

In the earlier volumes, Enright places his insights in vividly realised, more highly coloured, circumstances. The Egyptian poems in particular make greater use of landscape and atmosphere than survives into the poems set in the Far East, which realise the scene more obliquely, more sketchily. Here the emphasis falls heavily in one sense, lightly in another, on the moral perception—tricked into life as much by teasing metrical games as by a fragment of a scene, or an object, or the tail-end of an event seen through the corner of the eye. (p. 88)

Later, we discover Enright making a great deal more use of literary reference and religious myth to sharpen his perceptions into pain, pity and suffering. In Paradise Illustrated and A Faust Book he reduces religious symbolism to a convenient method of stating the old questions in a way that allows new connections to be made between them….

Enright remains what he calls 'a lurching humanist', but with a developed idea of how such a person, such a poet, might make use of the vantage points offered by the Creation story, or the Faust myth. What he is looking at from those vantage points is still the secular reality of human suffering. 'Thus Faust did good, as he wanted and / little good came of it'—the link between 'do-gooding' and 'good done' is clarified by the Marlovian and Goethean references….

With Musil, then, Enright 'inclines to a chronic irony', but not one that he can flatter himself will lead to the downfall of anything so portentous as the Austro-Hungarian Empire (see 'Pains'). Rather than cause, it comments on another kind of fall—what in Biblical terms he envisages as the Fall of man, into sin and death, pain and suffering, and finding that it isn't difficult to be a god, but that poets mustn't be. Poets must always be on the look-out for gods, both inside and outside themselves. For gods are really words, formed out of god knows what fears and apprehensions, and then masquerading as real—in useful stories, myths and legends. Now the stories must be used to return us to ourselves, to expose and disentangle the moral conundrums that words express, but conceal and distort too. (p. 89)