Seven years have gone by since the publication of Malcolm Mooney's Land, W. S. Graham's first collection since The Night-fishing appeared all of fifteen years before. In what, then, looks like a carefully anxious career, Mr Graham has slowly ground down his work until it is by now [in Implements in Their Places] concentrated on a small handful of subjects essential to himself—language and communication, his Scottish background, the Cornwall where he lives.

Ostensibly, the theme of communication is a large one. So severely does he delineate it that any breadth and profundity it might have offered him are scrupulously self-contained within his own given conditions. He keeps his writing to a few personal certainties—a quest for a language; a quest for home; a quest for the chance of artistic certainty itself, the right, true expression of a world that seems meagre and remote but which...