Several months after the death of poet Dannie Abse's wife in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years.

Several months after the death of poet Dannie Abse's wife in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years.

On 13th June 2005, Joan Abse, a writer and art historian and the wife of the poet Dannie Abse, was killed in a traffic accident at the age of seventy-eight. Following her death, for which the driver who drove into the back of their car at seventy miles an hour would later be convicted of dangerous driving, her husband of over fifty years kept a diary for therapeutic purposes and [The Presence] is the result. The book is part reflection on the reality of grief in the year following her death and part reminiscence on his married life and further back to his young childhood, interspersed with selections of poems both his own and those of other poets.

I had mixed feelings about this book, and it engendered feelings both of great familiarity and great unfamiliarity. Familiarity because Dannie Abse's retreat from London over many years was in the village of Ogmore-by-Sea, a settlement that I looked out on every day from my bedroom window as a child, and many of the Welsh locations that he mentions are familiar to me. Unfamiliarity because many if not most of the poets who form the background to the lives of this literary family are completely unknown to me, which somewhat detracted from my enjoyment of the book. So while this wasn't quite the book for me I'm inclined to try some of his other work in particular [Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve].

This is a section from the book which will probably appeal to LT readers, actually narrated by his older brother Leo, as he recalls how he (then aged 6 1/2) debated with their oldest brother Wilfred (age 8) what to buy as a present for the newly born brother Dannie:

What the new brother must have was reading material, for in Wales, unlike England, the term intellectual is not perjorative and we were brought up too, in a Jewish ethos which taught us that in the beginning was the Word. But Wilfred and I fell out as to what reading material was suitable.

I wanted to take him, for instruction on the wider world, 'The Children's Newspaper' an Arthur Mee publication of which, as became a future politician, I was an avid reader; but Wilfred thought a coloured comic was more suitable ... In the end with our pocket money we bought both. When my turn came to enter my brother's bedroom and I saw the sleeping babe I became afflicted with doubt about his capacity to appreciate my gift; but my mother reassured me and told me Dannie would enjoy the present when he was awake ...

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