Hamburger writes honestly, without fudging his feelings, but he has admitted into [Travelling] too many poems that are simply dull. His ironies tend either to lack sharpness (as in a poem on the erroneous bombing of friendly villages in Vietnam) or to be unconvincingly high-pitched (as in the pessimism about the consumer society in 'Report on a Supermarket'). The fact that his perception and criticism in these poems is so unfailingly right does not guarantee their impact on the reader. Yet Hamburger is a poet who blossoms marvellously when he has found the convincing images.

All is saved by those poems which show that he has found them, poems like 'Observer', 'The Cello' or 'For a Family Album'. They are moving poems because there is no spare snarling or flabbiness in them: the feelings are powerfully conveyed by the images, and Hamburger's preponderant sense of the hero as...