I find it difficult to form a clear opinion of Peter Davison's Pretending to Be Asleep. There are a few excellent poems and a few major embarrassments (as when he compares himself and his father to Telemachus and Odysseus). But the collection is not vividly memorable for either its faults or its virtues. It is basically competent but basically unexciting. Perhaps Davison simply has not found any theme which can exercise to the utmost his imagination and his moderate but genuine talent. I was most attracted by A Word in Your Ear on Behalf of Indifference, which is sensible and funny; Afterwards, which has a Herbert-like simplicity to its music; and Stumps, which deals nicely with those "amputations / Too short to see, too tall to be mown over."… I do not feel that the 14-poem title sequence captures, except in a very few places, the strangeness of the...