Thwaite, Anthony

Going Out

At eighty-four, Anthony Thwaite said that Going Out was likely to be the last book of poems he published in his lifetime, and that the title was apt.

But the words are wistful, even playful, and that is true of some of the book’s contents. The poems range over times and places, commemorating friends, and draw on memories, hard-won faith, and self-questioning. As Michael Frayn put it, Thwaite ‘writes with simplicity and precision about difficult and ambiguous things, the complexity and unceasingness of the world, the vastness and richness of the past, the elusiveness of the present – and the heroic persistence of our efforts to fix some trace of all this.’