The distinctive quality of William Meredith's "The Cheer" is its precision of statement, achieved for the most part without falling into aridity and abstraction. Mr. Meredith is refreshingly unafraid to think in poetry or to use the wide vocabulary and pliant syntax that many poets now deliberately avoid in favor of vatic pronouncement or egalitarian plainness. Consider, for instance, the opening of "Dying Away (Homage to Sigmund Freud)."… I am struck by the narrowness of the gap between the versified quotation from Freud and the continuation in Mr. Meredith's own voice. True, it is the poet who moves from the abstractness of "attitude" and "admiration" to the more particular hospitals, tombstones and trees; but surely the most arresting word in this passage is the abstract (and Freudian) "incestuous," which is endlessly suggestive in this context….

While few of these poems are remarkable for their depth of feeling, some...