Great

This is a selection from Lee's earlier poetry. There are a number of war poems, written at the time Lee was in Spain during the civil war, though there are many other poems about nature, life, love, sex and, which Lee does so well, about childhood and lost time.

Some of the lines put me in mind of Keats, which initially I put down to my having read a lot of his poetry recently. Still, Lee's "Drowsed but not drowned" does remind me of Keats' "For shade to shade will come too drowsily, and drown the wakeful anguish of the soul" (respectively, The Easter Green and On Melancholy). There are other turns of phrase and meter, too, which make me think I'm not wholly deluded in the comparison.

In summary, evocative poems which make me want to explore further his later poetry. ( )