What one misses, for most of Leslie Norris's … collection, Mountains Pheasants Polecats and other elegies, is the sense of tension creating a movement of style. Elegy can be a paradoxical form, possessing an adroitness in direct ratio to its emotive charge. As Auden proved, the more risks you take with it, the more passionate the balance you can finally achieve. So, here, the human elegies have more daring, and more weight: whereas those for vanishing life forms seem a little inhibited, rather consciously evenhanded.

Something in the form of long poems seems to over-extend them…. There is a cloying element in the diction, too: 'Black as nightfur', 'mortal stain', 'a fury of instinct'. The translations from the Welsh, however, have an energy that can carry the traditional phrasing: and in the shorter poems, particularly 'At Usk' and 'Stone and Fern', essentially the same formal approach, of repeated elements...