Abse makes the heart grow fonder

Dannie Abse and Louis Zukovsky are the book-ends of English poetry: its two alphabetical extremities. For that reason alone, I've been aware of Dannie Abse for a long time. Nonetheless, it was only hearing him on the Oxfam CD Life Lines 2 recently which gave me a particular spur to read his work. It was another Oxfam store which duly obliged, with a selection of his poems from 1963 (I'm aware he's had time to move on since, having published his latest collection, Running Late, in 2006).

The poem which stood out to me was one which provided an amusing commentary to society's current focus on environmentalism. Like the John Wain poem I referred to recently (which was published in 1956, just a year before this one), Letter to The Times provides a comic look at how humans differ from nature. Why do we bother to look after roses, it asks, when they make no effort to look after us? Why do we protest the cutting down of trees, when not one tree wrote 'an angry note in its sly green ink' when London was being bombed? Likewise, rivers are dishonest because they reflect swans upside down and stars 'are even too lazy / to shine when we are most awake'. His tongue-in-cheek conclusions are 'away then with trees and roses. / They are inhuman' and that 'we should pity them no more, / but concern ourselves with more natural things'.

It's a charming and pointed satire of people's hostility to nature and on its own made looking out his poetry worth the effort. There's an interesting commentary on his work by Peter Forbes here.