Hazy like foothills

As life-expectancy seems to grow longer by the minute, as it were — at least in our part of the globe — it was predictable that some writers would retain their marbles long enough to report ruefully back from the ageing-battlefield. At least two poets have done so very well: Roy Fuller and D. J. Enright; here is another, who, remarkably, kept on sending despatches almost to the end.

He did so in a particular way; this collection is called, correctly, Last Poems, but they are in no sense a summing-up of his career. His enjoyable Collected Poems (Sinclair-Stevenson) was published in 1994. The poems here, ‘short, intelligible, witty’ in the words of the Oldie editor Richard Ingrams, were commissioned once a month from 1999 for that magazine. They were written therefore (not a bad thing) with a defined audience in mind. They were also written, about half of them at a guess, during a period when after a healthy, even athletic, life, a series of illnesses suddenly descended; first of the heart (pacemaker, its installation here celebrated), then, too long undiagnosed, cancer of the throat (the last poem, two lines, sums up that).