In many of Ted Walker's poems, language facility works against the poet's eye; too many words with puzzling overtones, or connotations, pile up too fast, and the reader must strain to get past the impenetrable phrasing to anything behind it, beyond it…. Walker is more successful when a vividly pictured scene is kept sharply before the reader's eye until the finish, while meanings subtly add up to a forceful statement, inseparable from the persons or events which call them forth.

His best poems are the ones in which he dramatizes segments of being that have been crushed or suppressed by the conditions of civilized life, "wants kept caged on roofs / of the mind's tenements." Somehow, the dark neglected zones in the spirit hiddenly survive all the damages our indifference and half-aliveness can inflict…. In weaker poems, the shifts from description to message—statement of human analogy—are abrupt and unaccountable, and jar in the reader's ear. In the best poems, these two movements are carried on simultaneously, joined and jointed, seamlessly, in the poem's drama. The story movement—with animal protagonist in a setting that gradually shifts from a prescribed time and space to the stage of the human mind—is Walker's best mode….

In Walker's vision, our suppressed animal impulses nearly always manifest themselves in our daily lives as mildly persistent fears, incipient edginess, emerging at odd moments from no detectable source, "some close, restless agency, half-detected." But if this queer nervousness often appears dimly to be at the mere periphery of our mental life, "the lurking spy / that snipes us from the wilderness / of dreams," it is because we have fallen so far from the essential core of our being, we don't guess the deeper vacuity of our inner life and its terrors. In these poems, we learn, self-defeatingly, to cope with our wasted inner life as mules, whose "withers twitch to flies." That is as far as Walker's first collection [Fox on a Barn Door] carried this drama—the self exists in a stalemate with its terrors, half-crippled, conditioned to accept deadening compromises with loss.

But in The Solitaries, several poems deepen the vision, exploring psychic states in which the solitary human—or animal—soul, pushed or driven to harrowing extremity, finds a haunting beauty in the mere act of survival against powerful odds. (pp. 269-70)

The main reason [Ted Walker] does so much translating is probably that his own poems are limited, as well as fuelled, by his extraordinary penetration of nature, and the seed-catalogue specificity of terminology that seems to go with that cast of mind. Take this couple of stanzas from his poem "Bonfire" [in The Night Bathers]:

            All afternoon was the waft
            from blue fields, the stubble-scorch,
            prickling me to this. I crouch
            like an ancient to my craft,
            knowing this moment to lift
 
            dry leafage to little twigs
            and lean to a locked apex
            the slats of a smashed apple-box.
            Gripping broken ladder-legs,
            the blaze skips up to long logs
            of old, wasp-ruddled fruitwood….

One relaxes in the safe hands of somebody who really knows his way around a garden. It's a quality of disciplined seeing that Richard Wilbur shares; the quality that Andrew Young used to exemplify. And over and above the quality of seeing there is the quality of the performance.

But right over and above both the seeing and the way the things seen are put together, the conclusions come pat: the poem's argument is all too plainly a vehicle for its particular images. As a consequence the satisfactions are many―gratifyingly many, and let there be no doubt that Mr. Walker is a good poet—but the surprises are few….

From the make-up of this collection it's permissible to assume that Mr. Walker has sensed his danger and consequently stiffened his own work with translations of poems which attempt and achieve a greater amplitude of utterance—poems which may start out from nature but which get something said without being dragged down into the concrete detail of chaffinch-husks and the precise pitch of a bloodwort's warble.

"The heart of Hialmar" is a case in point. The attentive reader may track down the original in Leconte de Lisle's Poèmes barbares and note how Mr. Walker has tried to meet the challenge of reproducing not only the movement of the quatrain (which pretty well means adding something of his own every four lines) but also the disturbingly familiar tone of Hialmar's address to the raven.

Unfortunately one can't successfully tutoyer in English by using the grammatically acceptable, but effectively counter-productive, thou and thy, so things go wrong: "Come, bold raven, eating men is thy art, Pick my breast open with thy iron beak", is not the same as "Viens par ici, Corbeau, mon brave mangeur d'hommes / Ouvre-moi la poitrine avec ton bec de fer". But at least the attempt to capture the purely human tone is there—and with all its nature-notes which may very well have attracted Mr. Walker's attention in the first place, Le Coeur de Hialmar is nevertheless primarily a poem about a man speaking….

[The] translations should not be enough to mislead the reader into thinking that Mr. Walker, in his poetry as a whole, is easing up. On the contrary, he seems to be looking for a way out of the nature poetry he does to perfection and that comes to him with an ease which his artist's instinct is already teaching him to distrust.

[Ted Walker] unites the compulsions of the natural world with the complexity of human energies. An elegant and sophisticated poet, despite the butch persona sometimes on view, he has consistently shown a rare delicacy in making the image that both precisely represents his natural subject and embodies psychological correspondences. He is as good at this in Gloves to the Hangman as in any of his previous collections; in "New Forest Ponies"

            I nudged them along the verge
            until their stallion came
            prancing a disremembered rage
 
            through the ice twilight. His strength
            was sapped, a softening thong
            of wash-leather.

It is Mr Walker's central gift that he is able to make that stallion, "a tame / elderly man in tweeds … all wildness shrunk", a superbly realized co-existent, as well as a symbol of sapped domestic man…. [Gloves to the Hangman] has many examples of this strength, "At Pentre Ifan", "Boy by a River" and "August" among them. There are two poems, however, that suggest new directions. One is "Letter to Marcel Proust", which is looser, more discursive and more humorous … than anything Mr Walker has [previously] published. The other is "Pig pig" in which the fourteenth-century hangman of the book's title tells in thirteen formally taut and physically gory sections why and how he executes his sow for killing a child. It is a poem of powerful narrative momentum, skilful characterization and truly hideous, though in no way gratuitous, violence. In seeking and exposing the roots of cruelty, Mr Walker's savage drama is an exorcism, and his finest achievement…. (p. 646)

The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspaper Ltd. (London) 1973; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), June 8, 1973.