The earliest of [Enright's] Collected Poems go back more than 30 years, to the end of the 1940s; but already in them you find that absolutely characteristic move away from a feeling of his own to a thought about somebody else—and then another thought….

Enright has lived abroad, teaching English literature, for much of his life, and he has written poems about Egyptians, Japanese, Germans, Thais, and the Malays and Chinese of Singapore. He has seen a lot of suffering and oppression; but he has always tried to picture it in individual terms, turning a situation from facet to facet to catch it in as many lights as possible.

He can write as well about an Asian prime minister, listing the names of students who are to be arrested that night and for a moment seeing his own past reflected in their lives, as he can about a...