W. S. Graham's Selected Poems includes work published in England over thirty-five years from Cage Without Grievance (1942) to the Collected Poems 1942–1977 that appeared in 1979. This selection, however, does not proceed chronologically but begins with a number of poems that concentrate intensely upon the problematics of language both in poetry and at large. The first, a sequence of three poems from Implements In Their Places (1977), with the challenging reiteration of its title "What Is The Language Using Us For?," issues an announcement of the concerns Graham has come to, and stands almost as an admonition, a necessary question that must be confronted before we can proceed. The poem is deliberately difficult to settle into, switching the reader over between different voices and contexts, persistently interrogative in tones shifting from aggression to pathos. (p. 243)

What the poem calls painfully in question is the autonomy and identity of self…. The question of the title posits language as a determining force, a structure that has accumulated through history a resonance and gravity separate from individual speakers and which now dominates them. The struggle of the poem, and I think of much of Graham's work, is to discover if there is a self independent of language and what their relation is. These are not theoretically discovered problems, nicely delineated and laid out with any supposedly forensic detachment, but are palpably learned and worked over in the practice of the poems. The poem as a "constructed space" …, with its explicit, sometimes rebarbative, sometimes conciliatory relation between poet and reader, is the paradigm for all the problems which inhere in language. The quest for identity, for who is speaking to whom, is never comfortably settled. (p. 246)

[This first poem] seems to me to announce so clearly what has become the major preoccupation of W. S. Graham's work. Also it seems important to consider this as it is worked through one poem. This Selected Poems draws predominantly upon work from Malcolm Mooney's Land (1970) and Implements In Their Places (1977) in which so many of the poems relate to the problems that cluster around language: speaking to each other, the formulation of memory and experience, and the reality and fictionality of identity. But the preoccupation is important too in respect of Graham's earlier work. As is usually noticed, Graham's work in the 1940's was marked by the colored eloquence associated with Dylan Thomas. Working from such a style has almost certainly cost his reputation dear in having to make his way against the suspicious modesty of an English poetic whose readiest recognition was for the most obviously representational and what was fancied to be ordinary speech. A few of the earlier poems are included here, the titles of some indicating their manner: "Listen Put On Morning," "Men Sign The Sea," "Here Next The Chair I Was When Winter Went." These are poems of pronounced effects, bold and extravagant diction and resonant conspicuous rhythms. This is from "Men Sign The Sea,"

  This that the sea
  Moves through moves over sea-tongued the whole waters
  Woven over their breath. So can the floating fires
  Blow down on any.

The echoes of Thomas are evident enough in the alliteration and the close repetition of a forceful verb…. This is a powerful poem, not least in the central idea—embodied in the title—of the impositions of our histories and meanings upon the expressionless sea. But it is a style that falls in love with the sweets of language. In this romantic "craft or sullen art," the poet speaks in tongues, with everything validated by the effects of his rhetoric. Here is the good word with his "foxglove day" that Graham was to mimic in "Approaches To How They Behave." Graham learned well in these poems how they behave, and they need to be held against his later sense of how problematic language is.

But I don't think this should be seen as a simple transition or "improvement." Rather it might be argued that the manifest artifice and heightened diction of those earlier poems involves a sense and recognition of rhetoric and of how much the gravities of language and metaphorical fictions form how we "express" ourselves and see the world. Graham was never persuaded of the chimera of "common speech" or of the mode of realism with their supposed transparency of meaning. So in the long poem "The Nightfishing," the title poem of the book he published in 1955, the fishing voyage is consciously understood as a metaphor with the experience almost constructing itself into significance…. "The Nightfishing" moves continually between description and experience on the one hand, and the conscious awareness and idea about the experience and its embodiment in the poem on the other. Finally, at the center of the experience in the poem's midpoint, Graham relies upon rhetoric, perhaps inevitably, to render his epiphany…. (pp. 247-49)

In the two later books it becomes harder for the poet to name himself against the refractions of language and metaphor by the exercise of rhetoric. The fictions proliferate, Malcolm Mooney's blank whiteness or the painting in the beautiful poem "The Found Picture"…. Mister Simpson in "Ten Shots Of Mister Simpson" has lived a life evidently touched by the more desperate realities of modern history, yet it is all but impossible to represent him other than in a series of composed pictures. The poem ends:

        Ah Mister Simpson, Ah Reader, Ah
        Myself, our pictures are being taken.
        We stand still. Zennor Hill,
        Language and light begin to go
        To leave us looking at each other.

Whether this "looking at each other" is at last true discovery and recognition we are not sure, for the diction here is not permitted to rise to any apotheosis.

In a world of such possible fictions and "Communication's/Mistakes," Graham has concentrated more and more on personal relationships and has many poems that are directly addressed to particular individuals. There are fine poems to his wife … and poems to dead family and friends. These latter struggle with memory realized in words, and, in speaking to the dead, they figure in a specially poignant way all the difficulties of speaking with meaning…. The finest of these poems to my mind, and one of the strongest in this selection, is the poem to his dead father "To Alexander Graham." This is a poem of astounding directness and simplicity. His father appears in a dream wanting to speak "But the dream had no sound." The dream remembers moments and scenes from childhood that convey the sense of a complex relationship in which the ready exchange of feeling and regard through words was difficult or unsuited. In one way this leaves unanswered questions,… which come out with the bald awkwardness which always made them impossible to utter. Alexander Graham almost turns, as though to speak, but cannot. Father and son it is a noble inarticulateness, knowing and fearful of being glib, but even so leaving the hole of something vital left unsaid. Graham himself speaks in a sentence whose syntax and difficulty show the stress of such an utterance,

                                 My father,
                    I try to be the best
                    In you you give me always

and the poem ends with his speaking half to himself, half to us, in a common understatement that implicitly speaks for both of them:

                I think he wanted to speak.
                But the dream had no sound.
                I think I must have loved him.

There is no solution to the problems Graham poses. There is no "coming through," no clear permanent triumph of mastery or transcendence of the word. There are successes when the language is in some measure comprehended, and many skirmishings. Part of the thrall of language in this work is certainly the obsessive attention paid to it which might in itself seem to be debilitating. But always these Selected Poems are sensuous, whether loving or pained at what they touch. They represent a poet's work of some forty years that is inventive and rigorous, which never settles comfortably into what it can do, but remains restless, awkward, uncomfortable, and so rightly discomforting. (pp. 249-51)