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COLLECTED POEMS by Philip Larkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22.50). The pre- eminent poet of his time, Larkin died in 1985 at age 63. This collection includes works previously unpublished or unavailable in book form, and documents the triumph of a poet who found his style by lowering his voice...
Ultimately, the sense of conditional freedom illuminates all his best work, which is to say nearly everything in this book. Oddly enough, given his Oxford education and bookish life, Larkin was one of the century's greatest pastoral poets. "At Grass" (about retired racehorses) and "First Sight" (about winter-born lambs) are hymns to the inexorable rhythms of the seasons, to which each human, unfortunately, has only a short-term invitation. "Church Going" deals with a man-made structure. A wayward cyclist stops out of curiosity and enters an empty house of worship: "Once I am sure there's nothing...
...such loneliness preferable to the enforced communities of our forebears? Larkin does not pretend to know, or say. Instead, his poems address the selves that most people prefer to keep hidden during works and days: the nagging voice that wonders whether one choice was worth an infinity of losses. Impossible to answer; impossible, while reading Larkin or after, to forget...
BOOKS: The grim, funny, memorable Philip Larkin...
There are no tears, but no comfort either, in the poems of Larkin, an Englishman who died in 1985. His Collected Poems is an event. -- George Kennan's diverting Sketches from a Life...