Dannie Abse is a Welsh lyrical poet and medical doctor with a choirmaster's ear for language. Readers will hear, where there is narrative in these poems, a sometimes distant, sometimes nearby Welsh-English sound - call it pitch, call it history. And where there is song, something other - passages particularly beautiful in a language that is extra-English. There is mystical, moral sunlight in Abse's poetry, a gift for the simple truth.