The poems in this remarkably rewarding pamphlet are largely concerned with the illumination of individual lives by legend and myth-the particulars are given poignant significance by their identification with the wider pattern, the pattern is given a telling immediacy by being presented to us through the lives of the poems' protagonists-mother, friend or the poet himself. The language is equal to the disparate sources of the poems' inspiration; it can evoke mythic grandeur (usually by a powerful use of the 'heroic' alliterative line, e.g. 'As they felled our forests and leached life from our lakes./At the wild grave of Gwrtheyrn we grieve for his guidance . . .'), but also has the tact of intimate, particular knowledge:

But best on the path to Glandwr to surprise
Nin at the well with naked arms
Dipping the bucket that breaks the water
Into rippling replicas of her pleasant face

The understatement of 'pleasant' in the above quotation is typical of the scrupulous modesty of this aspect of Mr Moor's language. All the poems have the accent of necessity (unlike so much pamphlet verse which too often seems written under no greater need than that of vanity or a wish to enter competitions) and all of them engage with the world rather than with a poet's narcissism. My one regret is that Mr Moor did not include the beautiful 'Japanese Halloween' (PN Review 15) which seems to me the equal of ...