It is nearly twenty years since Dannie Abse's first book of poems was accepted by a London publisher….

Twenty years is a long time and Dannie is now forty-three. On his last two books in particular he has left an individual and master mark. Of Tenants of the House, published in 1957, The Listener's critic wrote that 'while the rest of us have been spending our time being smart or angry or whatever, [Dannie Abse] has quietly consolidated his position as one of the most satisfying and genuine of contemporary poets, with things to say that matter and the power to say them forcefully and originally.' To this general encomium I would add the more specific claim that he has made himself one of the few successful contemporary poets of the extended symbolic concept, a point as far from his beginnings in a natural, discursive eloquence as...