Thomas Blackburn's poetry is the poetry of trauma. Haunted by the demons of his childhood and racked by depression, Blackburn used poetry to probe his painful inner world, questioning the difficulty of faith, his problematic sexuality, and the mysterious inspiration offered by nature. Sometimes maudlin, Blackburn typically undertakes a tough-minded self-scrutiny, controlled through a fine command of traditional verse forms. In his later volumes, Blackburn increasingly abandons religious abstractions and turns to a more personal and unorthodox exploration of the spirit and of the eternal life beyond death. He is now best remembered for two early poems that appear in Philip Larkin's The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973), "Hospital for Defectives" and "Felo de Se."

The roots of Blackburn's poetry lie in his painful and turbulent childhood. In A Clip of Steel (1969)--a lightly fictionalized autobiography--Blackburn details the spiritual and psychological crises of his youth. Blackburn was...