[In the following excerpt, Owens comments on the structure, imagery, language, and themes of Final Reckoning.]

Although the volume shows no encompassing design or structure, the poems follow a careful ordering, forming groups and pairs of poems which comment on one another. The volume opens, for example, with “Dionysians in a Bad Time,” a poem tracing the decline of two writers, Strindberg and Kazantzakis, into guilt and angst and a Christianity which kills heart, spirit, and desire: “At the end,” one closed his eyes and “mumbled pieties”; the other “crowed once and fell silent, / numbed by the stellar chill, the vacuity / human swarms make / beneath immense star clusters moving in empty space.” These artists admit defeat and defeat themselves by closing their eyes and falling silent. In the next poem, “Carmen,” Layton sets Carmen's passion, “lawless, always off-limits,” against fear and rage and the murderous repression of desire which, in the end, “translates” Carmen's “insolent lust / into the chill perfection of death.” Until that happens, says the poet, “let fair Carmen prance and dance.” Carmen's triumph, however, her life-affirming dance, remains provisional, destined to end in her murder at each performance, and her spiritedness remains an unthinking, instinctual resistance to all that would stifle and suppress. The next poem reflects upon the first two by suggesting that the artist can resist wittingly and so, perhaps, enduringly. In “For Ettore, With Love and Admiration,” Layton speaks of an artist whose religious vision is far removed from conventional pieties, and whose landscapes acknowledge nature's indifference, nature as “primal terrorist,” but who does not, so to speak, fall silent in the face of vacuity: “above the gloom and doom of your dark lawns,” says Layton, rises the “laughter of your wild white roses, / your hollyhock and thistle and chickory.” “Dear friend,” Layton concludes, “one day you will bury [death] in one of your landscapes.” An artist like this can triumph, as Carmen cannot, as the artists described in the first two poems emphatically do not, and as the artist in the next poem, “Tristezza,” fails to do. Not without skill or discipline, this artist, who paints “canvas after canvas after canvas” of the Po and “of the same young woman whose hair / he colored differently, each time / doing some altering thing / to her neck or mouth,” does not see into the life of things, does not see what the narrator sees, that “the river could be the woman's unshed tears.” Most tellingly, his art has no resonance; it engenders only silence.

Such a vision of what constitutes an adequate artistic response implicitly makes large claims for art's enduring vitality and efficacy. At other moments, Layton adopts a stance which renders human endeavour transitory, and resistance meaningless. In “Etruscan Tombs,” the poet visits ancient tombs with a friend who spent his “best years” in a concentration camp, “menaced … with gun and whip / … made [to] slaver for crusts / urine-soiled and stale; / … made to kneel in shit.” The poet draws away from that grimly particularized image of suffering and here at “this remote scene” draws comfort—and abstractions—from the perspective afforded by the tombs:

                              these blank eyes sculpted
from grove and hill and rock
before which the centuries have passed unseen
comfort me; inuring me, I say,
to the sorrows our humanity
compels us to inflict on each other.
They teach me to live the free hours with gusto.

The poem closes on a balanced note which forges an equivalence between the friend's pain and the poet's pleasure: “Nothing endures for ever. / Your pain, my pleasure, the seconds bear away.” That the poet, near the start of the poem, asks his friend's “pardon” for his “abstracted gaze,” suggests that he perceives something sinful in reducing to “seconds” the “years” of his friend's pain, in retreating from grimly immediate detail to the abstract diction which permits him to contemplate sorrow from an unfeeling distance. In its own way, the poet's “abstracted gaze” signals a retreat from any messianic mission, a retreat as marked as that of Strindberg and Kazantzakis.

In “Twentieth Century Gothic,” Layton returns to the stance of a messianic poet—he's “God's recording angel loosed in a roaring desert”—but he is reduced to silence, dismayed by the fanaticism of holy men who “beseech the deaf walls,” dismayed even more by fanaticism's opposite, by the sensibility which “turns everything commonplace, / diminishes the most barbarous event into a happening / in search of a camera.” Faced with such imperviousness, the poet-prophet can only “gape at the blind lens.”

For Layton, love remains a source of strength. At the centre of the volume are three love poems standing like a kind of sanctuary for the poet, celebrating love's power to recreate him, first as man, then as god, and finally as poet. The series traces, too, a shifting sense of the relationship between this sanctuary and the world beyond. The first of the poems, “A Madrigal for Anna,” celebrates love's power to humanize, but it does so in stanzas carefully structured to suggest the nearly overwhelming force of the world's destructive powers. The first stanza exemplifies this:

The lioness leaps upon her prey.
The tyrant's teeth are white and strong.
The Apocalypse is on its way.
Saintliness keeps no one safe from wrong.
I, knowing the unloved man's a clod,
Let a woman's kisses warm my blood.

The first four lines, strongly end-stopped and moving from natural through moral and spiritual destruction to the inadequacy of human response, weigh heavily upon the lyrical, amatory moment at the end of the stanza. In the next poem, love makes of the poet's world an Eden, while in the third poem of the series, the outside world attends joyously upon the love poet: “The sun reels into my room like a pazzo,” “and butterflies alight / on the windowsill / to catch my metaphors / between their bright Sicilian wings.”

Elsewhere in the volume, Layton moves out from such sanctuary to, among other things, take aim at what he sees as the mediocrity and malice of academics and the literati, to castigate self-deceivers, to praise the heroic, to elegize, to derive comfort from the unceasing cycle of life and death, to characterize life, with its “mean compromises,” as a comedy “not worth a frog's fart.” In his final reckoning, he calls upon Zeus to “Preserve all poets mad and marvellous, / guard them from the fury of envious dust.”