SOURCE: Gyorgyey, Clara. Review of Welsh Retrospective, by Dannie Abse. World Literature Today 2, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 829.

In the following review, Gyorgyey offers brief criticism of Abse's Welsh Retrospective.

Dannie Abse's latest book [Welsh Retrospective], a slim volume of forty poems, many of them published in earlier collections, is a retrospective in several senses. Not only do these poems review his poetic career, but they also look back over Abse's experience as a Welshman, and very far back into the past of the Welsh culture and language. Teasing out and tracing the complex thread of his identity has been Abse's central theme throughout his poetry, but until this latest volume he has explored his Jewishness and his vocation as a doctor more thoroughly than he has his Welsh origins. Perhaps stimulated by the Welsh identity movement, which, in parallel with similar movements in Ireland and Scotland, has emphasized the distinctions...