The title-work of Dannie Abse's new book [Funland and Other Poems] is a sequence of nine poems loosely pegged to the euphemistic expression whereby a mental hospital is “a funhouse.” Society, or the world—“funland”—is a lunatic asylum, with “the superintendent,” “Mr. Poet,” “black-garbed priests / and scientists in long white coats” and others as the inhabitants. Dr. Abse's invention here runs much more to surrealist comedy and farcical fantasy than he has hitherto attempted, and it is a risky enterprise. Where everything is arbitrary, everything has to be taken on trust. For example, someone called Pythagorus starts a society and everyone joins it:

There are very few rules.
Members promise to abstain
from swallowing beans. They promise
not to pick up what has fallen
never to stir a fire with an iron
never to eat the heart of animals
never to walk on motorways
never to look in a mirror
that hangs beside a light.
All of us are happy with the rules.

But “a Society … has to be exclusive. / Therefore someone must be banned.” So the Thracians, whom no one has ever seen, are marked down for discrimination. And so on.

All this is done with a nonchalant jokiness of a kind that reminds one of such ingratiating performers as the Adrians Henri and Mitchell and Roger McGough:

Bored with his own act he shouts
JEHOVAH ONE BAAL NIL

is very much in that area. Of course Dr. Abse is far more adroit than they, but their relationship with their audience is comparable with what Dr. Abse seems to be reaching towards in “Funland.” The whole sequence has been successfully done on radio, and one imagines that it works very well from the platform too; but to many Abse admirers the real stuff will still seem to be found in the more private, less strenuously entertaining poems with which the new book begins—“Mysteries,” “Peachstone,” “A New Diary,” “Here” and several others, all of them confident, tactful, eloquent, with touches of gently worried humour. He can be more broadly humorous too, as he is in “Miss Book World” and “The Death of Aunt Alice,” without forcing tone or mood. At his best Dr. Abse is both a delightful and a disturbing poet.