To quote Harold Bloom, “Deprivation was for him what daffodils were for Wordworth.” Amazingly compact, crystalline poems which set the stage for an insight, beautifully expressed in the final stanza or line. The four volumes collected here (The North Ship, High Windows, Whitson Wedding and The Less Deceived) show the increasing fixture of an aging, lonely, isolated, and despairing poet. Death is everywhere—

• “a drum taps, a wintry drum.”
• The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.
• Still end in loss
• Always there is regret
• For always is always now.
• Only one ship is seeking us, a black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence, In her wake No waters breed or break.
• There is an evening coming in
• Desire of oblivion
• Hours giving evidence of birth advance on death equally slowly.
• Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what some have and hidden from us chose  And age, and then the only end of age.
• And yet spend all our life on imprecisions, That when we start to die, Have no idea why.
• At death you break up. The bits that were you start speeding away from each other for ever with no one to see. It is only oblivion, true.