Dannie Abse's Collected Poems is a substantial book. It displays a serious poet ("Yes, Madam, as a poet I do take myself seriously") developing his characteristic sense of irony, and a style which managed to move rapidly from the artificiality of an early poem like "Epithalamion" to a mixture of plain speaking and sonorous elevation capable of expressing how "everything and everybody / are perplexed and perplexing, deeply unknown". In "Letter to Alex Comfort" Dr. Abse comments on how his friend has "dug deep / into the wriggling earth for a rainbow with an honest spade" and those words might well serve to describe the progress of his own career as a poet. The honesty has been conspicuous, and his alertness to a wide range of experience, the vicissitudes and oddities of daily life, has produced a modest number of rainbows.

However, situations which may seem strikingly full of ironic coincidences and possibilities will often resist attempts to rework them at the level of art, and a good few of Dannie Abse's most ambitious poems press on relentlessly in disregard of this fact. "A Night Out" can be seen as fairly typical. It opens with familiar ease, disarmingly conversational … then, after skirmishing with the poetic … it plunges headlong…. The reader has been carefully prepared for the second, central stanza in which, as they munch milk chocolate, the poet and his wife watch

    trustful children, no older than our own,
    strolling into the chambers without fuss,
    whilst smoke, black and curly, oozed from chimneys.

This is moving and the heart (though not yet the point) of the poem, but—as happens rather often with Dr. Abse—the final stanza moves towards a conclusion of self-defeating explicitness:

        Then to the comfortable suburb swiftly
        where, arriving home, we garaged the car.
        We asked the au pair girl from Germany
        if anyone had phoned at all, or called,
        and, of course, if the children had woken.
        Reassured, together we climbed the stairs,
        undressed together, and naked together,
        in the dark, in the marital bed, made love.

The details here seems to be walking a tightrope between, on the one hand, a direct transcription of experience and, on the other, a knowing contrivance. It makes its point, undeniably, but that au pair girl from Germany—though likely enough in fact—is far too conveniently there in the poem. Also there is an almost programmed exactness about the ironic parallels between the "trustful children" on the screen and the poet's own sleeping children, as well as between the Nazi atrocities (the victims represented by the actors) and the couple in their comfortable suburb "naked together, in the dark". Darkness of the cinema, of the bedroom, or "our time". Public/private: Brutality/intimacy etc. "A Night Out" sinks beneath the weight of its construction. What clearly sets out to say something deeply personal and important ends by creating the impact of a skilful montage. The juxtapositions draw attention to themselves, and somehow the imagination stops there.