Seven years have gone by since the publication of Malcolm Mooney's Land, W. S. Graham's first collection since The Night-fishing appeared all of fifteen years before. In what, then, looks like a carefully anxious career, Mr Graham has slowly ground down his work until it is by now [in Implements in Their Places] concentrated on a small handful of subjects essential to himself—language and communication, his Scottish background, the Cornwall where he lives.

Ostensibly, the theme of communication is a large one. So severely does he delineate it that any breadth and profundity it might have offered him are scrupulously self-contained within his own given conditions. He keeps his writing to a few personal certainties—a quest for a language; a quest for home; a quest for the chance of artistic certainty itself, the right, true expression of a world that seems meagre and remote but which does enlarge by itself into a metaphor of the loneliness of making art.

Graham has a strangely clipped rhythm, very much his own—his own pulse in the line. There are times when it reads like willed inelegance. Odd line-breaks, jolting expressions, and contortions in his syntax enforce his meaning, which I take to be that of difficulty itself—difficulty of understanding, difficulty of saying anything in the proper way.

My own familiarity with Mr Graham's forlornly revisited and remembered Renfrewshire was satisfyingly dislocated by his presentation of it. It was good, too, to be shown in that way the extent to which his poetry is not the abstract puzzlements about language it can seem. His presence is in an alien language—alien, but inevitably so; he is not at home there and is at home nowhere other than in amateur metaphysics and philosophies of life and language which enable him to specify the predicaments of his life and art. Where his system breaks down is in the larger aphorisms it generates—

                  Communication is always
                  On the edge of ridiculous.

That is a large denial.

Graham's Antarctic language-world of Malcolm Mooney's Land—the name, I think, fuses his background with the remoteness of language from the purposes writers want to make it serve—is too extreme. It may derive from his own creative despair as much as it does from the truth…. Meaning is caricatured because mind cannot handle it adequately. Mr Graham is well insured here, however. Part of his meaning is that he cannot handle it to his satisfaction. But the state of mind leaves no room for exceptions to it, for those true things that exist no matter what time we live in, or who we are, or what language we speak. Withdrawing from what can be recognised, and identified, a poet like Mr Graham can write poems which seem asocial, even if they seek to add to the sum of things which we understand. Implements in Their Places is very much a book for private meditation, no matter how public the theme of communication might seem to be. (p. 82)