"Way out in the center," the title of his 1981 volume of poems, is how Dannie Abse situates his own work in relation to that of his contemporaries. In a series of six annual anthologies of poetry and criticism ( Poetry Dimension 2-7, 1974-1980) he has acknowledged by the catholicity of his taste the "variousness and lucidity" of British poetry. On a map of the territory that ranges from the romantic primitivism of Ted Hughes to the modernist sophistication of Charles Tomlinson, from the chthonic depths of Geoffrey Hill to the plangent ironies of Philip Larkin, Dannie Abse occupies an identifiable place, at once in the central British tradition of poetry as a social act of communication and yet "way out" at a distance from the work of his principal fellow poets. Introducing his Collected Poems (1977), he says that his ambition is "to write poems which appear translucent but are...