Dannie Abse is a Welsh lyrical poet and medical doctor with a choirmaster’s ear for language. Readers will hear, where there is narrative in these poems, a sometimes distant, sometimes nearby Welsh-English sound – call it pitch, call it history. And where there is song, something other – passages particularly beautiful in a language that is extra-English. There is mystical, moral sunlight in Abse’s poetry, a gift for the simple truth.

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From the Book:

PUSHKIN'S AUTUMN FLOWERS (1825)

As the drooping autumn flowers touch us
more plagently than those that blaze in Spring
so the pigeon mood returns to when we parted
more than those candy minutes when we courted
and timelessness was everything.

Dannie Abse was born in Wales in 1925. He spent many years as a chest specialist in a London teaching hospital. He has published over 20 books, including four novels and a memoir.

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