Signed Poetry Books - Dannie Abse

The Oxfam Bookshop on East Street, Chichester, is a fine example of the genre and it's hard to leave it empty-handed. Yesterday it was Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones, the interviews with Seamus Heaney - about which I'm sure there'll be more in due course - and this latest addition to the ongoing but now very slowly accumulating Signed Poetry Book collection.

Dr. Abse was a proper doctor, the sort that diagnose and treat ailments, rather than one who has written a thesis. I saw him, venerable at the age of 86, when he did the Status Quo job of opening the show for a Benefit for the Haiti Disaster in Westminster in 2010 organized by Ms. Duffy. He was the only poet of the many assembled to be given an audience by Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had made a speech undertaking to send Haiti all our spare corrugated iron before sliding away to contiune trying to shore up his ailing Premiership. Younger readers might think that's all that Prime Ministers ever do. It's all that the recent ones have had as a priority.

Ask the Bloody Horse is notable for its esoteric vocabulary, including animalcules, thoracoplasty, thesmothete, nyctalopia, katabolic and corybantic, some of which might require a medical dictionary rather than the full version of the OED. I doubt if my two volumes of Shorter will have them all. I don't personally find such lexis efficacious in pursuit of ultra-Parnassian expressivity but if those were the words he felt the need to use it's not for me to say he shouldn't have.