Be Seated, Thou

Dannie Abse, the great Welsh poet, is clearly in the devil’s party: his work has a cauterizing honesty and a clear and lyrical beauty that serves his and our humanity. Like William Carlos Williams and John Keats, Abse is a medical doctor who deals with life and death with the steady hand of one who is especially familiar with them, as if they were fellow citizens. Of course his practice here is song and not medicine, and that song wounds and heals and wounds again. This is a collection of mostly new poems with helpful selections of his early work. Abse has written over twenty books, including the poetry collections Arcadia, One Mile, and White Coat, Purple Coat, and the novel Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve.