4 Critical Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 3

after a crisis Tillinghast has accepted the inevitable failure of the wild uto- pian dreams of the 1960s, and that these poems reflect a new maturity, a new language of acceptance and stoicism and joy. At the end he continues his journey, driving his car across the Golden Gate. ‘into the redwoods and foothills, into the open darkness’.

C. B. COX

NEIL POWELL

The noble truce (Greville: Caelica, XLV)

You are elsewhere. I wander through space your absence creates: the punctual hibiscus’ enacts time’s passing gestures

and the world glows with dull light; a residue of thunder coating the arrested air, growing deeper, heavier.

I thought I’d got over this but am grateful, all the same, for love’s return, another round in an abandoned game;

grateful to find that the old absurdly adolescent symptoms of anxiety are not wholly lost or spent,

and that long-discarded masks seem homely, familiar - forsaken melancholic, ironic versifier. . . But beyond the Anglepoise the window holds dusk and rain only just at bay and proves Greville right absence is pain.