SOURCE: O'Neill, Michael. “A Nostalgia for Belief.” Times Literary Supplement no. 4373 (23 January 1987): 92.

In the following review, O'Neill comments on the mysterious quality of Ask the Bloody Horse.

Both the charm and the limitations of Ask the Bloody Horse are highlighted by the fact that its poems are never so cheerfully wise or conversationally at ease as when they display their obsessive interest in the mysterious. In “Quests” Dannie Abse presents desire for “the other world” with a detachment which shades into regret in the last tercet: “Who knows? Not me. Secular, I'll never hear / the spheres, their perfect orchestra, or below, / with joy, old Triton playing out of tune.” Asserting the poet's secular stance, the lines half-humorously betray a nostalgia for belief. Though the shoulder-shrugging ruefulness (signalled by the nod at Wordsworth in the last line) is attractive, it threatens to neutralize urgency.

Several poems flirt with what...