Poetry like this is a way of knowing, a search for wisdom which
retains feeling in all its violence and yet contains it within
the appropriate form. These poems have, therefore, an air of decorum,
sometimes precarious, sometimes precious, savouring at all times
of exactitude, and precision. The tone is always intimate towards
both the reader and the poem's subject. In harmony with this intimacy
there is an observation of the physical world which is startling
in its sensuous and yet miniscule detail. Even the instances of
savagery — a dead child bearing the burns of stubbed cigarettes
on its body are confronted without becoming melodramatic. The
closeness of everything — atrocity, the dead, the world of flower
and insect, of wife and child, of the past and the future — would
be overpowering were it not always measured for us by the poet's
extraordinary linguistic control. The adjustments available for
this control are varied. At times, it is the rhythmic control
in a line; at times it is the syntactical control in a stanza,
or of both throughout a whole poem. On other occasions, it is
the control of figure, epithet, reference.
To speak of these things in such terms is to risk indicating Aidan
Mathews's mastery of technique, as though that were somehow independent
of his feeling. But technique raised to this pitch is a moral
and emotional achievement. It is rarely seen. This volume of poems
is one of the scarce examples of the integrity of feeling and
technique, the wholeness that poetry always seeks.'
