Anthony Thwaite in the Sunday Telegraph, 21st November, 2004

There are times, or moods, when you want a poet to talk to you, in the sense of listening to memorable speech, not too high-flown; you hear it in George Herbert, in Robert Frost, in Edward Thomas, in Philip Larkin. There are other times when what you want is something strange, intricately made, even ornate; in their very different ways Donne, Milton, Hopkins, Geoffrey Hill. It's not exactly a matter of penny plain, tuppence coloured, though.

In this batch of recent collections, P.J. Kavanagh is someone who talks to you, though sometimes you overhear him thinking. His Something About is excellent at seeing things, wondering about them, getting them down with a sort of wristy ease. In his "commonplace book" A Sort of Journal, he commented: "You notice things, perhaps they are not worth noticing, but it takes time to get your eye in, and notice them at all." Her is 'Small Voice':

     Yesterday a gusting wind made float
     flat deer-shapes over the surface of green-wheat,
     today it is twitching shoals of silver fish
     which at the field's sky-edge are white
     gulls in flocks, they fly and never take off.

     Nothing is there, nor gulls, nor fish, nor deer,
     nothing but moving air and the voice we hear.
     is not in the wind and what we say and feel
     about what we see and we nearly hear will not
     (which is good) be ever quite right or enough.

This seems to me almost perfect of its kind, thoughtfully removing in the second stanza everything that has been equally thoughtfully put down in the first - a lovely slight of hand. Kavanagh is very good at capturing insubstantial things (the passing weather, animals and birds glimpsed, sudden religious awe) and ruminatively letting you see them and think about them.