Dannie Abse's Collected Poems is a substantial book. It displays a serious poet ("Yes, Madam, as a poet I do take myself seriously") developing his characteristic sense of irony, and a style which managed to move rapidly from the artificiality of an early poem like "Epithalamion" to a mixture of plain speaking and sonorous elevation capable of expressing how "everything and everybody / are perplexed and perplexing, deeply unknown". In "Letter to Alex Comfort" Dr. Abse comments on how his friend has "dug deep / into the wriggling earth for a rainbow with an honest spade" and those words might well serve to describe the progress of his own career as a poet. The honesty has been conspicuous, and his alertness to a wide range of experience, the vicissitudes and oddities of daily life, has produced a modest number of rainbows.

However, situations which may seem strikingly full of ironic...