Although Andrew Waterman's first collection of poems did not appear until he had reached the far from precocious age of thirty-four, his subsequent output has been astonishing in quantity and, recently, impressive in quality. It is unusual enough for a poet to produce collections in successive years, as Waterman did in 1980 and 1981; it is the more extraordinary when the title poem of Out for the Elements (1981) consists of 178 rhymed stanzas occupying ninety pages of a very substantial book. "Out for the Elements," the sequence, is a major achievement in other more important ways too, in technique and intention a cumulative piece of writing toward which Waterman's earlier poems can clearly be seen to lead.

Born in 1940, Andrew John Waterman grew up in South London suburbia so frequently and tellingly evoked in his poems. When he was nine, his adoptive father, Leonard Waterman, left the household; he himself left...