[The work in Dannie Abse's Way Out in the Centre] is as diverse as the man and grows out of his Jewish heritage, the practice of medicine, life in the city of London, a concern with poetry and other poets, the experience of love and loss. The title, which comes from the last line of "A Note to Donald Davie in Tennessee," suggests something of the dissociation the poet seems to feel from the world in which he lives…. But the best poems in the book are finally such more private ones as the love poem "Last Words," the epithalamion "Smile Please" and the two beautifully moving poems on the poet's mother, "A Winter Visit" and "X-ray."

In a poem called "One Sunday Afternoon" the speaker finds himself in a house where, 200 years earlier, the squire hanged himself: "But listen—a small coincidence—a slam / from the hall (the curtains shook) and I am / less rational, more alone, since in my book / not seeing is believing." The last words here, "not seeing is believing," suggest the darker currents that often trouble the generally clear waters of the collection: the irrational, the inexplicable, the tragic emerge from time to time to disclaim the apparent order of Abse's world. One of the best poems in the book, "Bedtime Story," offers, at the outset, a vision of reality that colors the entire collection. In it the speaker describes first the "flawed lineage" of "angels botched" and then their leader…. This solitary figure "in long black overcoat / on spoilt snow," who embodies all that blights our fallen world, is the most striking in the book, and it is evoked again and again by the poems that follow…. [One] of the strengths of these poems is that while they are set in the familiar, ordered world of our daily lives, they refuse to rest in its comforting, rational appearances.