[Dannie Abse's Collected Poems 1948–1976] are enjoyable because most of them are well-made, they can be understood at a first or second reading which pleases both the author and his considerable following; they are enlivening because many of them contain moments of humour, give the same satisfaction as a good short story, and are very much of our time in being framed within recognisable situations; and several of them, the core of Abse's achievement, convey a real feeling of unease, which is what interests me most. There are few contemporary practitioners in English who communicate such a sense of something very nasty continuing, through us and around us—a sort of disquieting apprehension that things are about to fall apart even in the most banal and humdrum circumstances. It is as if he really wishes to celebrate only the spontaneous joys, the hopes and consolations of living, but is overtaken by his knowledge of the dust we each come to. Gently, tenderly, compassionately he reminds us—in sadness and some wonder—of the common fate. (p. 18)

[Although he is prolific, a] handful of poems gives Abse his reputation, and this is all he needs. At its lowest, in his more lightweight structures, that reputation has come under attack for its presentation of a confessional, London Welsh Jewish 'victim' who believes that modern, urban, confused, middle-class existence is decent subject-matter for poetry. Rubbish, say these shocked reviewers, who shy away from any aspect of contemporary realism, and accuse Abse of representational modishness…. It is true that he has put on a fashionable, liberal-radical New Statesman shirt (e.g. 'Demo against the Vietnam war, 1968', 'Haloes') too often for some tastes, and slides easily into smartness and throwaway journalistic cliché (parts of 'Miss Book World', 'The death of Aunt Alice', 'Car journeys', 'The bereaved' etc.), though charitably one could say that such technique in these particular cases was almost justified, appropriate to the content and journalistic only in its concision. But these are piffling, secondary elements on the edge of Abse's main effort which, as I said, is concerned with this grave apprehension of disaster and a recognition of the terrifying in the midst of ordinariness. He believes that poetry should be written out of a personal predicament—hopefully reaching beyond itself to shared 'universal' experience—not as an essay turned into neat, civilised verse; and his commitment to the difficulty of doing this is total. He has written about things which appear everyday and commonplace, then he suddenly injects the icy unmentionable, and succeeds in making 'large statements out of small concerns'…. (pp. 20-1)

I see no obvious literary influences on Abse. He likes T. S. Eliot very much, which is evident from two of his book titles, the second having a slight twist—Tenants of the House and Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve: and a reversal—'Human kind / cannot bear very much unreality' (from 'A winter convalescence'). The best part of the Eliot influence is textual, in Abse's employment of a cool intellect when stacking up a bank of emotional images that could collapse into bathos; there is seldom any loss of control. He has absorbed the wise lessons in Eliot's criticism, and mentions his debt to him in the savage mental-hospital sequence Funland, which he refers to as 'The Waste Land gone mad'—and frankly, I find much of it impenetrable. Perhaps we are meant to find it so. The madness and screaming chaos, the pitiful repression, the sexual graffiti as self-expression, the blanketing illogic of existence in a terminal asylum are probably well served by jagged disjointedness, the fragmented and staccato style of writing. Coping with minds at the end of their tether cannot be described in a placid, ordered form. Anyway, Abse does not need to explain the obscurities of Funland, to analyse it all away in footnotes or before audiences…. (p. 25)

I once heard Dannie Abse read 'A night out'—about going with his wife to see a harrowing film on Auschwitz and then going home afterwards and making love…. I consider 'A night out' to be one of his best and most significant poems, showing as it does a sensitive and civilised man's speechless, helpless response to barbaric enormity. Flatly he recounts what he sees on the screen, remembers what he and his wife did ('we munched milk chocolate'), notes little details later ('You took off one glove'), mentions without bitterness 'the au pair girl from Germany', and then, blotting out the images of hate, 'in the marital bed, made love'…. Churlish critres might say that the last two lines ['undressed together, and naked together, / in the dark, in the marital bed, made love'] are facile, pointing up the contrast too glibly. But I doubt if Abse would invent a phoney climax to such an important theme, this 'spotlit drama of our nightmares' could only make a genuine poem. (pp. 26-7)

Sometimes [Abse] despairs and sometimes he celebrates, which sounds like the usual see-saw of intelligent resignation. There was a period when I thought that the visible bits of his pessimism were based on the natural law that if something can go wrong, it will; a dark streak of sardonic acceptance was uppermost. But now, as he grows older, I think the despair is much deeper than that, and it stems from the unsolved mystery of life, the paramount question which cannot be answered—as in 'Hunt the thimble':

          Is it like that? Or hours after that even:
          the darkness inside a dead man's mouth?
 
          No, no, I have told you:
          you are cold, and you cannot describe it.

This sounds like the end, the shutters coming down once and for all. Finis. But these lines do not imply a stoic acceptance. The mystery remains, and it prevents a kind of tolerable completeness. God is obviously absent, and the vacuum baffles Abse. The threadbare critical approach to his work, the weekend journals which are too often obsessed with him as secular 'Jewish victim' or whatever, is shallow when compared with his concern at this depth. Certainly, when the poetry of his middle span is considered, it does something to dissipate the damp fog of mediocrity generated by some of his English colleagues.

The short blurb on the back of this book quotes the still-respected and usually accurate TLS, like some ultimate seal of approval: 'Dr. Abse has made a steady advance to a dry recognisable voice … charming but masculine, a craftsman whose skill does not hobble his integrity, an artist whose unvarnished truths give pleasure' [see excerpt above]. Charming, indeed! Pleasure! I suppose so, but what is more interesting is that inimitable chill going right through you. Didn't the TLS scribe read advanced Abse? He deserves that generous puff and much more, after nearly 30 years of conscientious effort—an intelligent, accomplished poet, a deeply learned person and an unfailingly compassionate one. His later years may yet see him evacuating the frantic metropolitan stage to become an urban recluse or to retire to his nest at Ogmore-by-sea, there to complete the long difficult metaphysical sequence which he surely has it within him to write—assuming that by then the atmosphere of violence and simmering crisis in our society, which is inimical to poetic contemplation, has not defeated him. Meanwhile here is the carefully selected, definitive [Collected Poems 1948–1976] Volume One. (pp. 30-1)