SOURCE: “A Refusal to Forget,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 14, 1989, p. 402.

In the following review, Hainsworth provides a favorable assessment of Collected Poems.

Primo Levi wrote a characteristically troubled and self-deflating cover-note for the Italian edition of his collected poems published by Mondadori in 1984. The impulse to compose in verse was, he suggested, something genetically implanted in human beings, something irrational. He himself felt no special awe of poetry and was not particularly proficient at it. All the same, from time to time, “at an uncertain hour” (he was particularly drawn to this phrase from the “Ancient Mariner”, which in its Italian form, Ad ora incerta, gave him the title for the collection), he had found himself feeling that verse was the best way of expressing a particular image or idea. The sum total of poems was not in fact large—sixty or so original pieces between 1943 and...