The words human and humane ring briskly through [the essays in Mr. Enright's The Apothecary's Shop], as, indeed, do their implications through his poems. Mr. Enright is a moralist—undoctrinaire but (if one can rid the word of false and mis-D(ennis) J(oseph) Enright 1920– Courtesy of Chatto & Windusleading accretions) committed. He is impatient with work which is not demonstrably about something, scornful of critics who obfuscate the something when it's there….

'The greater part of current literary criticism resembles a game of skittles played with ivory chess pieces,' writes Mr. Enright. The danger of the other kind of literary critical game which has come into being since Mr. Enright wrote those words is that the equipment is deliberately crude and the players deliberately tough…. Mr. Enright is not really this sort of player, but there are a few distressing streaks, chiefly apparent in the...