A major collection by one of Great Britain’s great poets in the tradition of Eliot, Auden, and Yeats.  A nearly unremitting focus on the approach of death colors all of Larkin’s work.  Though using rhyme in the traditional manner, his bleak image of unhappy, empty, time-felling and time passing childhood and adulthood are grim, shadowy, dark, damp, lugubrious, etc.  The passage of life, inexorably day-by-day and the approach of death, certain but unpredictable—“life is slow dying”, “the loss of interest, hair, enterprise…” “Most things never happen, this one will”.   The sea, railroads, urban and rural settings all combine for a major bleakness and despair, yet oddly lifting to see those all too human fears, thoughts, and hopes spelled out in sparse, hard but perfect language. A new favorite!