While it is inevitable to invoke Ted Hughes when considering the poetry of David Wevill – and not only because of Hughes’s ill-fated relationship with Wevill’s wife, Assia – it is also a lazy comparison. Wevill has, after all, had a career in poetry which is both prolific in its own way and has been, in terms of chronology, longer lasting. The problem is that Wevill, although born in Canada and long domiciled in Texas, started that career in the UK. As the publishers, Shearsman themselves, note, ‘While resident in England in the 1950s and ‘60s, [Wevill] established a substantial reputation as a poet, publishing four volumes between 1964 and 1973. He won prizes, was represented in major anthologies such as The New Poetry and A Group Anthology, and was included in the renowned Penguin Modern Poets series before his first full collection appeared.’ None of which, of course, aligns Wevill with Hughes per se. But open almost any page of the first two books collected in the Collected Earlier Poems and it feels almost impossible not to view them through the perspective of our received notion of what Hughes was doing.

I wonder how possible it will be to read Wevill’s ‘Black Pantheress’ without Hughes’ Jaguar pacing up and down its cage and staring back at you. And yet, and yet… Wevill initially places the live pantheress in the landscape among the jungle, the monsoon, ‘under the loud stars at night, or by / thick cordwood heaped for winter in the hills / where ice struck.’ But, as we ...