Dannie Abse … is about as accepting of the human lot, for all its disasters, as a poet in 1978 could be. Since his last volume, Funland, came out five years ago, one is sorry to see that only the last twenty pages of this two-hundred page collection [Collected Poems 1948–1976] date from after that Funland itself was a much better book of poems than Mr. Abse's earlier work, and is surely the heart of the new volume; but that this poet possesses Eliot's "different way of saying it" I'm not fully convinced. [In his essay "What is Minor Poetry," T. S. Eliot defines a genuine poet as one who has something new to say and has a "different way of saying it."] (p. 232)

These poems reveal a decent man, not very different from us (or what we'd like to think we are), except that Dannie Abse is both a physician...