I have little to say of Peter Davison's second book of poems [The City and the Island], except that it is pretty much on a par with his first of two years ago. He is still "all promise", with few fulfilled poems. His chief faults are an average imagination and lapses in tone within a given poem, both amply illustrated in Eurydice in Darkness and One of the Muses. These poems are also among those which continue to search his chief thematic concern: the minds of women. Writing on this theme, he has written more evenly but also more dully, as in Lucifer Ashore, Intacta, and Mary Magdalene at Easter.

Davison has, however, a considerable virtue, especially nowadays: his constant, however precarious, involvement with craft is evident throughout his book; and the result, when not burdened with tonal lapses, is an open, simple, declarative diction wholly without pretentiousness...