The poem is a single sinuous line, itself punctuated by "little steps and quivers." The faltering footsteps of old age have been turned into a sort of minuet; and yet, unlike, say, Raine's terrifying evocation of his dying mother, Thwaite's words could apply to your mother or to mine, indeed, to anyone's remembered mother. To conjure up that wobbling gait, Raine or Fanthorpe would have forged startling similes; Thwaite prefers the simplest, most commodious words. In this way, he encompasses our startled recognition that as we age we sometimes catch the echo of long-vanished footsteps in our own unsteady pace. The sensation is at once spooky and comforting. Thwaite's poem persuades by the beauty of its music, by those grave and twining cadences that make out of dissolution itself something almost fugal in its progress. 

All the 14 poems in this little volume display a comparable mastery. Here, too, are pity and terror but they have been transformed into a mortal melody spacious enough to include us all.