Galileo's Salad

John Heath-Stubbs's new book is more elegiac, but no less firm in its celebrations, than his last, "Sweetapple Earth" (1993). As he reflects in his poem "The Ascent", "The poems in my file are bleak enough, / Written in the knowledge one I loved,/My bright beautiful friend, had got to die – / And die before his time – and now is dead". Yet with his accustomed ear for birdsong, his fascination with the material world, and his instinct for transcendence, he goes on, even though "there's nothing at the top / But the cold snow and the clear air – / Nothing between me and God except the darkness, / And the uncaring stars predestined wheeling".

No poet since Auden has had the technical resources Heath-Stubbs deploys in his wonderfully various work. He is a poet on a substantial scale, ranging over the literatures of Europe and the Mediterranean. Intimate with classical and biblical traditions, his tone is never earnest: he has a fine sense of humour and a wry way of commenting on modern life.

"His poetry is formidable, amiable, hugely intelligent and sacramental", the Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote. C. H.Sisson called him "a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability" (a reference to the poet's blindness).