Professor Skelton obviously learned to polish his verse into what … is now the "casual mastery" mentioned in one of the poems, but I am unable to find anything very new or interesting in what the poems stand for [in Selected Poems]. One of two examples exist where the conclusions are meant to be half understood by the readers. One is "At Walden Pond" where

   I stamp on the ice of a man a hundred years dead.
   My children scream half-laughters at the risk … (of crossing the ice.)
   But I don't laugh.

The best poem in the collection is one about a prisoner of war released by the Japanese after World War Two who recalls having been marched through Nagasaki after the American atomic bombing:

              "It looked like a flower
              among the stones," he said,
              "a cup and saucer
              melted and hardened back
              into folds of petals.
              Lovely it...