SOURCE: "Five Young English Poets," in Poetry, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 3, December, 1956, pp. 193-200.

Morse is an American educator, poet, critic, and author of children's books. In the excerpt below, he offers praise for My Many-Coated Man.

[Laurie Lee's] My Many-coated Man, published in 1955, was a choice of the Poetry Book Society and won the William Foyle Poetry Prize. An extremely slim book indeed, it contains fifteen poems Selected from those "written since the war." The austerity of Lee's selection works ultimately to the great advantage of the poems, each of which has a page to itself, without the competition of print on the verso of the preceding leaf.

Read through at a single sitting, which is temptingly easy, My Many-coated Man reveals a deceptively narrow range. Metaphors and images recur with unusual frequency; the poems give an immediate impression of being versions of the same poem. A second...