[In To Walk a Crooked Mile, McGrath] has continued the tradition of the English poets of the Thirties with their deep concern for those disturbing elements of social life—poverty, injustice and war. But he does not suffer from some of their weaknesses which Virginia Woolf describes in her essay on poets of the "Leaning Tower." In the first place, when contemplating a harsh and chaotic world, he never allows his genuine pity for the oppressed to degenerate into self-pity; and secondly, he is never forced to retreat into a world of private fantasy and introspection. In consequence he has been able not only to sustain the tradition which would otherwise appear to be almost extinct, but has brought to it a new and vigorous honesty.

Most of this collection are poems of "occasion" in which McGrath uses a very great variety of vivid images….

But the often...