The mysterious privacy to be found in [the various landscapes of The Honeymoon Voyage] is one the poet shares with those divine and human presences who, whether rooted or in exile, define the numen of their homes and in collusion with their recorder allow the reader to participate in their own myths. In this sense Thomas is one of the least egocentric of writers, concerned to feel his way through self-effacements into the disturbing otherness of worlds where ancestral voices speak in their allusive tongues while he holds seance….

The title poem sends the collection into a new direction, and possibly the least successful one. From our homes we make voyages into death and pain; the traverse is made through a dragging erotic sea, and the verse slips and sways towards its unconcluded ends. Syntax loosens; the cadences are held on light reins. Reason clouds, and the poems...