A Strong Dose of Myself collects Abse's essays, broadcasts and lectures from the past decade. They are presented frankly as an assemblage of disparate items, a "mosaic" in which Abse hopes the reader will "find a pattern". A pattern, if that means a structure which implies an appropriate place for every fragment, does not emerge, but there are recurrent themes, which will be familiar to those who have enjoyed Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve and A Poet in the Family: medical practice, the search for a poetic voice, the richly quirky suburban existence of a family of "wandering Welsh Jews", the self-doubt and self-advertisement of a competitive youngest son.

Inevitably, perhaps, some of the most absorbing pieces are those dealing with medical experience. "Notes Mainly at the Clinic" is chiefly concerned not with cancer and tuberculosis but with psychology: the psychology of the incompetent doctor, of the patient who undergoes major surgery without ever letting himself understand that he has cancer, of the journalist who interviews Abse as poet and then, having asked bluntly "What moves you to tears, Dr. Abse?", confesses that she is herself suffering from a terminal illness. Such material may be merely a higher form of gossip, but it does have a further interest, in showing the plain-speaking stoicism and modesty of Abse's best poems to be a by-product of frequent confrontations with anxious suffering in situations where the ordinary human resources of common sense, kindness and imagination are at least as valuable as medical expertise.

The essays and lectures on poetry are less impressive, mainly because Abse often fails to push his insights far enough, or to make the connections they invite…. [For example, lecturing] to the Institute of Psychoanalysis on "Originality and Imitation in Poetry", he suggests that the apprentice poet has a filial relationship to the masters he imitates, that "the roots of a poet's technical rebelliousness … may find nourishment in the darkness of his Oedipus complex". Hardly a novel suggestion, but still a promising point of departure. But Abse quickly turns away from it and takes refuge in the classification of poets into risk-takers and safety-seekers, confessing an impulse to dismiss as "tosh" such claims as Yeats's that the artist's venture "into the abyss of himself" may require a "reckless courage".

Yet Abse himself is capable of entering the abyss…. Among the volume's autobiographical pieces are two stories of haunting strangeness and melancholy power, "My Father's Red Indian" and "An Old Friend". How far they are factually "true" is not clear, and doesn't matter; indeed, both contrive to render mysterious the whole notion of factual truth, and in doing so reveal a ghostly kinship…. The two stories combine dreamlike patterns of submerged significance with a fabric of seemingly inconsequent realistic detail in a manner that recalls the work of Jocelyn Brooke. Together they constitute a small masterpiece and it would be a pity if they were overlooked among the blander material that makes up the rest of the volume.