C. Day Lewis is the first Poet Laureate to regard himself as ‘an expatriate son of Ireland’. In his new book he shows himself freshly aware of the voices that come to him from his Anglo-Irish heredity and early environment.

Besides elegant and charactersitic evocations of persons and places he had known in Ireland, there are several poems which celebrate the Easter rising of 1916 and such figures as Countess Markievicz and Michael Collins.

The second part of the book contains poems on a variety of other themes – death, transcience, the academic, the heroic – which are suffused with lyricism and edged with wit.