These new poems, most of them written over the last eight or nine years, are as varied and as captivating as ever—more of that inimitable Betjeman counterpoint that makes a new collection an occasion: places, human encounters, meditations, entertaining verbal fisticuffs with “public” hates, threnodies on lost friends, and the pensive regard of familiar vistas that now draw their warmth and color from nearer horizons. The poet Philip Larkin wrote in
The Guardian
: "Almost alone among living poets he is in the best sense a committed writer, whose poems spring from what he really feels about real life, and as a result he brings back to poetry a sense of dramatic urgency it had all but lost."
Much of the originality of John Betjeman as a poet, apart from the unique assonance of his haunting verse forms, comes from the sharp and affectionate gusto with which he introduces his readers to the people and places in a poetic world he has made so much his own. He has few rivals in the personal harmonics he draws from his themes and from the natural world as the setting for human hopes and achievements in all their odd, humorous, and poignant trajectories.