A Voice in the Mountain is a pleasant, intelligent collection by one who obviously wants to be understood. There is much that is elegant here, but it is an elegance tempered with urbanity and a good narrative technique. Peter Davison has obviously learnt much from Robert Frost. "Making Much of Orioles", a tale about saving orioles from a felled elm, is written in competent Frostian iambics and it ends in a predictably Frostian moral…. To write like Frost but not quite as well as Frost is the risk this poet seems willing to take to get himself in trim, as it were, for writing poems which are not at all like Frost but wholly his own. Mr Davison is at his best when he is least self-conscious and allows his talents as a critic and satirist full rein…. There are so many good poems in A Voice in...