With the publication of The White Threshold …, W. S. Graham moved into the front rank of those who are striving to light up the imaginative dialogue of poet and reader without resort to well-laid fuses of moral or social response and also without the adoption of any attitude (whether fashionable or institutional: masochistic-elegiac, fission-happy, or chat-and-dogma) towards personal experience except the bedrock attitude of acceptance, of patience, interest, exploration, wonder, and vigilance. The difficulty of this attempt to remain undistracted and unwooed in our time can be met only by a strong integrity in the artist, by an undeviating and dangerous singlemindedness which will pitilessly test whatever faith he has in his ability to record, to speak, to leave the dead and gesture to the unborn. Only out of what Graham calls 'the centre loneliness' will good communication come; only when we cast off from the shore will...