[The work in Dannie Abse's Way Out in the Centre] is as diverse as the man and grows out of his Jewish heritage, the practice of medicine, life in the city of London, a concern with poetry and other poets, the experience of love and loss. The title, which comes from the last line of "A Note to Donald Davie in Tennessee," suggests something of the dissociation the poet seems to feel from the world in which he lives…. But the best poems in the book are finally such more private ones as the love poem "Last Words," the epithalamion "Smile Please" and the two beautifully moving poems on the poet's mother, "A Winter Visit" and "X-ray."

In a poem called "One Sunday Afternoon" the speaker finds himself in a house where, 200 years earlier, the squire hanged himself: "But listen—a small coincidence—a slam / from the hall...