There is a preoccupation with death in The Breaking of the Day. Of the best poems in the book—and the best are good—a number are concerned with the implications and act of dying, this concern being illustrated in ways totally different by Not Forgotten (a sequence of five poems), The Suicide, Finale: Presto, and The Massacre of the Innocents. The foregoing poems are—basically—narrative, and in the narrative poem Mr. Davison moves extremely well; it is his forte. (p. 203)

The more introspective or abstract poems are very uneven. They range from the excellent—as in At the Site of Last Night's Fire, and North Shore—to the unsatisfactory—as in Jenny and Out of Tune, poems with good fragments but which in their final lines have a horrid patness. The apparent necessity to write a poem about Robert Frost, and The Bomb (not necessarily in...