David Kenneth Holbrook, fellow of Downing College, Cambridge and director of English studies, is an important literary and cultural critic as well as an important, contemporary poet. For such a prolific author, his work as a poet began late. Although he was in his late thirties before his first volume of verse appeared, his poetry is a crucial part of a creative and critical enterprise, reasserting goodness and truth, celebrating life and reality, in what he views as a technologically dominated society devoted to dehumanization, hate, and false solutions. The back cover of his recent Chance of a Lifetime (1978) describes well the relationship between his criticism and poetry: "His critical work is integral with his central creative preoccupation as exemplified in these poems, in which he finds ways of establishing a sense of meaning in daily existence. The warmth and humanity of his writing, especially about family life...