In the stopping train is just as full of jolts as it sounds, largely because Davie so often leaps out of his reverie to hang desperately on the communication-cord. There are some items in his book, to be sure, which appear to proceed according to plan…. But other poems here are invaded and overcome by apprehensive clamminess….
'To Thom Gunn in Los Altos, California' sets out with a mock-and matey-heroic 'Conquistador! Live dangerously, my Byron', but quickly becomes a long shudder at the Californian coastline, the far edge of the world, looking out over the be-numbing indifference of the Pacific. 'What am I doing, I who am scared of edges?', Davie ends by asking. The answer is often: looking scared, and in the same sweaty, domestic way as the late Robert Lowell. It's not just the nearness to the surface here of Davie's family, friends and personal habits, or even the occasional red splash of schizophrenia …, but the auto-diagnostic impulse, the febrile, pulse-taking fear of self. More sinister, though—because one senses the strain Davie is experiencing in keeping his disgust bottled in images—is 'St Paul's Revisited', a 'sermon' on Depravity…. [Suddenly] Davie the moralist becomes Davie the unhonoured prophet, and looks not at all at home in this world. It is in the glowering light of [poems] … like this that simpler pieces, say 'A Wistful poem called "Readers"' …, take on the glint of paranoia. It all leaves one wondering whether Davie's indignation is now an ingrowing thing, destined to torture him into a last, loud phase as the Angry Old Man. (p. 489)
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