Dannie Abse … is about as accepting of the human lot, for all its disasters, as a poet in 1978 could be. Since his last volume, Funland, came out five years ago, one is sorry to see that only the last twenty pages of this two-hundred page collection [Collected Poems 1948–1976] date from after that Funland itself was a much better book of poems than Mr. Abse's earlier work, and is surely the heart of the new volume; but that this poet possesses Eliot's "different way of saying it" I'm not fully convinced. [In his essay "What is Minor Poetry," T. S. Eliot defines a genuine poet as one who has something new to say and has a "different way of saying it."] (p. 232)

These poems reveal a decent man, not very different from us (or what we'd like to think we are), except that Dannie Abse is both a physician and a poet. Still, being the decent man can sometimes be a poetic liability. In "Demo Against the Vietnam war, 1968," Abse, challenging himself to "Praise just one thing in London," decides that it will not be some royal park, nor the Thames, nor some "elegiac Square," nor the National Gallery; no, it will be a "tatty group, under Nelson's column" making their protest against the war…. The reader is expertly invited to become a decent man also, feel a glow, and at moments like this one senses Abse's limitation as a poet, his failure to write (in Stevens's term) a poem that resists the intelligence almost successfully. Or perhaps it is just that a touch of Amis's or Larkin's unniceness would be welcome, surprising and enlivening—the sort of thing that the poetry of liberalism can't give us. I wondered also why Abse has not written more poems about his medical experience, at least on the basis of a scarifying one about a bungled operation ("In the Theatre") he leaves behind the decent-man persona and goes after something different. At any rate, this poet deserves to have more American readers…. (pp. 232-33)