Donald Davie's In the Stopping Train indicates that [a] tendency toward reduced style [exists in] contemporary English poetry …, though for Davie's book … one can see the tendency as part of a larger desire to test the language's ability to treat emotions that are often ignored by unitary visions. For Davie, who praises his French teacher for giving him the language of Ronsard, conventional themes provide occasions to see "the whole / Diction kit begin to fall apart," and the interest in his collection lies in the self-consciousness of his efforts to shun the "unlikely … enormous, louring resonant spaces / carved out by a Virgil" and gauge his style to "small clearances, small poems." At times, as in "Father, The Cavalier," the efforts add up to nothing more than rhetorical adroitness—the withholding or the correct placing of a word. The work's final "mostly," sentimentalizing the photo, qualifies "unnoticed" but also echoes the assertion / qualification of the poem's second stanza—"A surrogate / Virility, perhaps." "The Harrow" creates its tension syntactically by withholding the verb "stir." These techniques work well in the opening half of "Depravity: Two Sermons" and in "Bedfordshire" to bring irony to the conventions of occasional poems. Although in poems like "Morning," "To a Teacher of French," "Widowers," and "A Spring Song," Davie emerges with a live voice, readers may wonder whether there is not as much artifice in this voice as in one that strives for elegance, and if the reason for Davie's efforts is political rather than artistic. American readers especially may concur with the imagined reader of "A Spring Song" that "the sort of acrobatics that this poet / Is good at, we can do without." (p. 465)
[A] self-conscious style, conventional themes, and political intent [are what] one finds in Davie's volume…. (p. 466)
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