Why I May Never See the Walls of China

An eye for detail informs these poems by Anthony Howell. The book charts his wanderings from Hampshire to Australia, and finally to Sicily. His renewed interest in the description of emotional as well as geographical landscape is one of the pleasures of this large collection. Here he allows subject matter to temper the abstraction for which he is noted, while still demanding that each poem should be an exhilarating manifestation of language. Robert Nye wrote that his last collection "Notions of a Mirror" (1983) "deserves the attention of anyone who cares for poetry at all"; Peter Porter found it "a delightful book – fresh, clever, humane and dandified once more... The best of the poems are as arresting as the work of French surrealists like Reverdy and Desnos. But there is British sturdiness as well".