A comprehensive collection of the poetry of Dannie Abse, comprising over 250 poems which have appeared in a dozen previous volumes of his work, together with 29 new poems.

Casgliad cynhwysfawr o gerddi Dannie Abse, yn cynnwys dros 250 o gerddi a ymddangosodd mewn dwsin o gyfrolau blaenorol o'i waith, ynghyd â 29 cerdd newydd.

This is the third version of Dannie Abse's Collected Poems to appear. The earliest (1977) had 204 pages, the second (1989) 274. This new volume comes in at a bumper 426 pages; it adds Remembrance of Crimes Past (1990), On the Evening Road (1994) and Arcadia, One Mile (1998), and closes with a section of 29 new poems. One of the best of this final group is 'The Yellow Bird', which Abse has rescued from his first book, After Every Green Thing (1948), and heavily revised.

His previous Collecteds opened with 'The Uninvited'; New and Collected Poems begins with 'Toy Soldiers', also an early poem but apparently unrevised. It demonstrates that from the first his imagination was detached, ironic and quick to home in on a natural metaphor:

Blow your toy bugle, child, blow,
poppy days need not endure,
the factory is making new soldiers
and father will buy you more.

Abse condensed his sense of poetic self in 'Duality', a poem of the early nineteen-fifties:

Twice upon a time,
there was a man who had two faces,
two faces but one profile . . .

'They dream their separate dreams', he tells us, but when they sing they 'make one rhyme'.

Death I love and Death I hate
(I'll be with you soon and late).
Love I love and Love I loathe
God I mock and God I prove,
yes, myself I kill, myself I save.

Melodramatic? Perhaps. Later he would play variations on this idea in 'White Coat, Purple Coat', a poem of the mid-nineteen-seventies. The white coat (of the surgeon?) is stained by real blood, the purple coat (of the love poet?) by a phantom rose. Together they 'compose a hybrid style'. At the risk of freezing, a man can wear the white coat, at the risk of burning, the purple.

Love and death, it's often said, are the master subjects of poetry. Over more than fifty years of poetry writing, Abse has shuttled restlessly between them, haunted by both, sometimes managing to combine the two. As doctor, Jew, and now old man, he feels death intensely. At the same time, poems in his later collections praise sunflowers, wood, wine, music.

An essential book.

Richard Poole

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