A poem, writes Donald Davie in "Ars Poetica," is "a space / Cleared to walk around in." The definition, better than many, seems to apply particularly to the twenty-eight short poems that make up In the Stopping Train…. As we read through the poems here, we encounter, as Davie puts it, "small clearances," each of which, with its distinct boundaries, excludes "the turbulence it was cleared from." Each poem, to use Frost's words, seems "a momentary stay against confusion": it takes us, quietly and skillfully, through twenty or forty or fifty lines to a firm conclusion. While we find no "enormous … spaces" here (even the six-page poem "In the Stopping Train" is really a sequence of short ones), these scanty plots of ground are generally satisfying confines to walk around in.
The poems here have the qualities we expect of Donald Davie: they are quiet, restrained, erudite, carefully wrought—a poetry of statement rather than of image. They are generally public and, in some cases, occasional rather than private or intensely personal. Particular people and places, as they often do with Davie, figure prominently in the collection….
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