Graham's [poems] concentrate on themselves. The result is only rarely narcissistic; more often it's an absorbed and absorbing effort to map the boundaries of language—which for him have become more definite and restrictive as he's grown older. They're emphasised, no doubt, by his failure to secure a large attentive public; in one late poem he touchingly admits:

                   Speaking to you and not
                   Knowing if you are there
                   Is not too difficult.
                   My words are used to that.

This imprisonment within the self is all the more distressing for having followed a time of expansive confidence. Throughout the Forties and early Fifties his neo-Apocalyptic sympathies led him to undertake such sustained flights of rhetorical fancy that there seems something penitential about the austerity of his recent work.

Graham's anxiety that 'words make light of us' doesn't become his dominant theme until The Nightfishing (1955). The principal reason for its...