Every poem by Mr. Graham is not only very deliberately constructed but, in the musical sense, through-composed. No word is where it is merely for the sake of the "meaning" in a flat prose sense. Yet the patternings are not abstract, they reinforce deeper layers of meaning…. Mr. Graham's poems are not only about their subjects, but about themselves as attempts to embody their subjects, and therefore about the mystery of poetic language. Words like "still" and "change" in the largest [and title] poem here, The Nightfishing, work realistically and metaphysically. The sea is real and not conceptual, and yet it is also a metaphor, and yet what it is a metaphor for—the tragic struggle of the poet to make shape out of something, his life, say, which is always changing its shape—is most concretely expressed by itself:

       The voyage sails you no more than your own.
       And on its wrought epitaph fathers itself
       The sea as metaphor of the sea.

The poet's name is literally "writ on water." His task seems hopeless, but must be perpetually renewed. (pp. 394, 396)

Mr. Graham's single-mindedness may make him, to some readers, seem monotonous. He has a very small range of recurrent images, and perhaps a single dominant mood, though within that mood … a real variety of tones. But to carp about his monotony is like complaining that Braque, at one period, was interested only in fish on a kitchen table. Braque's excitement was not about the fish but about a problem of remaking, a problem never quite finally solved. So, also, for Mr. Graham every poem is another attempt to construct the poem out of the range of given materials, and it is an act in and through which for the time being he emotionally exhausts himself…. In the two Ballads at the end of this book, Mr. Graham is … humorous and relaxed. In one of them he seems to me to parody and claim to be the heir—the heir and ritual slayer—of a very great poet, indeed:

              And O it is not to ask me by
                  The flensing or the spear,
              Or the grey table of the grave
                  That writes between us here.
              But it is enough to ask me by
                  His likeness I wear.

It is the likeness of Yeats—"Crazy Jane" and some of the later ballads—that Mr. Graham seems to me to be wearing here; and the writing might be on the gravestone in Drumcliffe Churchyard, though it is an upright limestone slab and not a grey table…. He has nothing like Yeats's range and humanity; he has, perhaps, a comparable intensity and passion, and he feels, like Yeats, "the fascination of what's difficult". No other poet of Mr. Graham's generation constructs poetry with his patience and skill. And The Nightfishing is far and away his most distinguished volume so far. (p. 396)