Reading Ted Walker's well-made collection, Burning the Ivy, I was reminded of the joke about the man who invented television—in 1975. It worked but it wasn't sufficiently original. In order to praise Walker's animal poems, you'd have to forget that Ted Hughes invented animals in 1956. Naturally, there are good lines … but even the best have a remaindered feel about them. Moreover, Hughes isn't the only poltergeist throwing his weight around in these poems…. [Frost] is the main ghost in this cadence:

            Powdery mortar has begun to fall
            As fall it did our first winter here.

Throughout Burning the Ivy, one is aware of a white-haired figure guiding Ted Walker's elbow as he sagely moralises over his various agricultural tasks. But there are also touches of Betjeman …, Eliot's 'Burnt Norton' …, the awkwardly reverent Larkin … and Auden's 'Their Lonely Betters'…. In the end, you feel that literature itself is the really fatal influence. (p. 883)