Talk of Donald Davie's 'new' collection would not be strictly accurate. Even parts of the title sequence, Three for Water Music, are borrowed from his last volume, In the Stopping Train, and the bulk of the book is simply a reprint of his earlier work, The Shires. 'Three Poems of Sicily' are shared between the two Mediterranean pieces, 'The Fountain of Cyanë' and 'The Fountain of Arethusa' which sandwich the very English ('deuce, Fred Perry serving …') 'Wild Boar Clough'. Myth and personal memories (of childhood, 'Infidel youth' and shrine-seeking maturity) mingle with musings on familiar Davie themes in series of separate poems employing a wide range of imitative styles. Here Davie borrows the metre of Shelley's 'Arethusa' to celebrate not only the original poem, but his own precociousness—and to pay homage to his mother whose love of literature made it possible:
In a parlour game,
Required to name
Mountains beginning with A,
Proudly, aged ten,
I pronounced it then:
The Akrokeraunian Mountain!
The egotistical impulse gains momentum through the rest of the volume, The Shires resembling nothing so much as an album of snapshots in which the peripatetic professor features prominently, while the 40-odd counties assume the role of Hall's-Distemper boards. (p. 19)
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