Clive Wilmer, poet, translator, editor, and regular contributor of book reviews and essays to British periodicals, is most closely associated with Poetry Nation Review whose editor, Michael Schmidt, also publishes Wilmer's poetry through his Carcanet Press. Wilmer's first full-length book of poetry, The Dwelling-Place (1977), has been praised for its thematic unity and for its technical mastery of traditional forms. Tennyson, the mature Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and the earlier formalism of Thom Gunn are the governing spirits of the volume's antithetical strains of stoic rationalism and the longing for a lost heroic past. In Devotions (1982), Wilmer displays a wider, more affirmative range of sensibility. John Ruskin, David Jones, Geoffrey Hill, the later Gunn, and the Winters with a keen eye for natural detail inform the poet's new concern with the relation between sensation and intellect, between the natural world and human language, as these antiphonal pairs mutually define...