John Adlard's last book The Lichfield Elegies collected quiet meditations on the relations of past and present and mourned the increasingly fragmented nature of experience. Songs For Dobra, inspired by a Dalmatian legend about a 15th-century witch and her beautiful daughter, takes the argument a step further by recreating a time and place when doubts about the human condition were likely to have been considered degenerate and even heretical. Adlard clearly had a lot of fun writing the Songs and there is something tremendously pleasing and inviting about the book's simplicity:
      

An old woman has sold me
Small black, squashy grapes.
Who was that old woman?
I have never tasted such pleasure.
I think I shall never see that old woman
again.
(21)

Adlard's last book yearned for 'cordial, unfashionable songs': here he has supplied them himself and once again I thoroughly enjoyed being in the company of the generous and civilized mind that produced them. The Whiteness of Her Becoming collects poems from 1966-91 to give us a body of work which Jon Silkin's introduction calls 'idiosyncratic' and 'in the best sense, eccentric'. These seem appropriate adjectives to apply to a poet whose major influences have been Bunting, Heath-Stubbs and the poets loosely grouped around J.H. Prynne. Silkin is right to identify 'Mrs James' and 'Against War', a translation of Tibullus, as standout pieces but the rest of the book is a disappointment. ...