[Any account of Davie's] work since 1970 must be at least partly concerned with the tension (at best a creative tension) between Davie and his English audience or, more bluntly, between Davie and England. (p. 39)

The restless, ruminative sense of a mind moving among half-understood echoes and associations informs the poems in The Shires [1974]—a far richer book than it at first appears—as well as many of the pieces at the end of the Collected Poems [1972] and in Davie's most recent collection, In the Stopping Train (1977). The circumstances surrounding Davie's emigration to California in 1968, and the poems written at that time, are outside the chronological scope of this volume; but the perplexed and unresolved tensions with England continue to reverberate….

The responses to England contained in The Shires are far from comfortable but they are glancingly, and therefore the more sharply, affectionate: if 'love' has not 'drained away'...