[In the following review, Gyorgyey offers brief criticism of Abse's Welsh Retrospective.]

Dannie Abse's latest book [Welsh Retrospective], a slim volume of forty poems, many of them published in earlier collections, is a retrospective in several senses. Not only do these poems review his poetic career, but they also look back over Abse's experience as a Welshman, and very far back into the past of the Welsh culture and language. Teasing out and tracing the complex thread of his identity has been Abse's central theme throughout his poetry, but until this latest volume he has explored his Jewishness and his vocation as a doctor more thoroughly than he has his Welsh origins. Perhaps stimulated by the Welsh identity movement, which, in parallel with similar movements in Ireland and Scotland, has emphasized the distinctions among the cultures of the British isles, Abse here focuses on the distinctive Welshness of his own experience.

Unlike Gillian Clarke and other contemporary Welsh poets, Abse does not live in Wales, and he does not write in the Welsh language, although he is conversant in Welsh and does include three free translations of ancient Welsh poetry in Welsh Retrospective. Abse's Welshness resides primarily in a strong sense of place, particularly in childhood memories, and in an equally strong sense of the character of Wales as enmeshed in his parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Two poems, one a tribute to Dylan Thomas and one to Vernon Watkins, testify to the poetic heritage in Abse's Welsh identity. Ultimately, however, these poems tell the reader a great deal more about Abse than they do about Wales, and the connection between Wales and several of the poems, like “Musical Moments” and “The Theatre,” is tangential at best. Finally, without dates of publication for the poems, the collection is missing an essential element. This is a strange oversight, considering that Cary Archard has supplied both an introduction and extensive notes on the poems.