Dr. Abse has made a steady advance from the sonorous anonymity of his early poems—touched by Yeats and Dylan Thomas—to a dry, recognizable voice. Even since his 1962 volume [Poems, Golders Green], he has enlarged the virtues apparent in poems like "Chalk" until he can now claim [in A Small Desperation] to be charming but masculine, a craftsman whose skill does not hobble his integrity. In style he tends to be aphoristic, quotably witty: he tells us, "The cenotaph clock punishes the hour"; he remarks "the made ghost in a vacuum cleaner". His landscapes are urban; his people undergo fringe emotions like tolerable anxiety and hesitant courage. As a moralist he judges himself more harshly than he judges others. Here is an artist whose unvarnished truths give pleasure.

"Special Pleading," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1968; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission...