SOURCE: Greening, John. “What's in the Dust.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5025 (23 July 1999): 24.

In the following review, Greening compliments the underlying theme of “survival” found in the poems in From the Neanderthal.

From the Neanderthal marks the return to verse of Adam Thorpe, best known as the author of Ulverton and two other novels. His poems patrol frontiers and thresholds in time, scanning the past through powerful lenses, sharing irrational fears, keeping their distance from real danger. In “The Exchange”, his daughter's concern at a wayside crucifix (“Why that man, he fall / in the water?”) is undermined by the father's amusement at her misunderstanding (“Well why they hung him up to dry, then?”); elsewhere, he sees a hot-air balloon's “tongue of fire” and is convinced it is ablaze; and in an extended poem about a rocky childhood landscape, even the lichen is “barely clinging to the world”.

“Ghosts” is...