A very English domesticity

Anthony Thwaite is among the last surviving links to the Movement of the mid-1950s. That group (which was named by J. D. Scott, a former literary editor of this magazine) was ideologically diffuse — largely because it wasn’t a movement in the formal sense — and short-lived, but its members’ early work marked the transitional stage in literature between patrician romanticism and demotic, illusion-free modernism. In the last few years Thwaite has perhaps been mentioned chiefly for his role as literary executor to another poet briefly associated with the Movement, Philip Larkin — he edited the posthumous Collected Poems (1988) and Selected Letters (1992) — but this new book, which collects most of the verse from Thwaite’s 50-plus years as a practitioner, serves as an excellent reminder of his own great qualities as a poet.

Certain topics are fairly constant in Thwaite’s work through the decades: archaeology, history, childhood, death and isolation in particular have been regular features.