Christ’s Teeth

C.K. Stead

• Studies in the Ezra Pound by Donald Davie
  Carcanet, 388 pp, £25.00, April 1991, ISBN 0 85635 850 9
• Poems 1963-1983 by Michael Longley
  Secker, 205 pp, £8.00, August 1991, ISBN 0 436 25676 2
• Under the Circumstances by D.J. Enright
  Oxford, 64 pp, £5.99, May 1991, ISBN 0 19 282834 7
• In the Echoey Tunnel by Christopher Reid
  Faber, 73 pp, £12.99, September 1991, ISBN 0 571 16252 5
• A Cold Coming by Tony Harrison
  Bloodaxe, 16 pp, £2.95, July 1991, ISBN 1 85224 186 1

‘Dates, dates are of the essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called “Rock-Drill”, and the inauguration of the next, called “Thrones”.’ This is Donald Davie in his introduction to Studies in Ezra Pound, offered as Volume IV of his Collected Works, and including the whole of Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), followed by a single essay from 1972, then ‘Six Notes on Ezra Pound’ from Trying to Explain (1980 – nowhere actually named in the present volume), and nine essays and reviews written since. Excluded without mention is his 1975 Pound in the Fontana Modern Masters series, a book that mixed some of his best critical insights with strange eruptions of moralising petulance.