Arrows of Inscrutability

In addition to being a poet, D.M. Black is also a psychoanalyst and a translator, notably of Goethe and Dante. The thematic range of his work is, unsurprisingly, very wide, and erudite in the best sense of a word, being frequently classically, philosophically and theologically enriched. Many poems in this volume also have an undeniably inscrutable quality. This may seem like a kind way of saying they are simply obscure - but it is very much more than this - they often seem to probe, test and peer into the human psyche, the human condition, until the outer skin of inscrutability peels away and an undeniable, though nevertheless indefinable, clarity, sometimes uplifting, sometimes terrifying, emerges.
[...]
[...]the theological aspect of Black's poetry, and this is nowhere more evident than in 'The Size of Things (A reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity)'. There is, however, nothing dry, dusty or abstruse about this poem, for it achives the rare feat of turning what is for many people (myself included) an increasingly irrelevant concept into something fresh, astonishing and bursting with the vigour of original discovery. The title playfully emphasizes the opening - and closing - conceit, from wich the poem swiftly finds a route into what must be the liveliest of divine meditations; a yoking together of disparate ideas from different epochs that borders on the metapysical, albeit a metaphysical approach that few of its past masters, except perhaps Donne, would recognise.
[...]
Returning to the theme of war, and of culpability for false allegiances - or, in far broader terms, of simply becoming embedded in the wrong side of history - there is a challenging two part poem, 'The Uses of Mythology', which conflates classical and Chistian perspectives, respectively with the ramifications of Third Reich fascism on the artist.
[...]
We are left to contemplate the brutal particulars of our own world, but there is also that insistent and recurring sense of something transcendent running through the poem, and indeed through the entire volume, that serves to knit the whole together into an unsettling vision of the human spiritual condition. This is a complex, challenging collection of distinctive, frequently masterful poetry, and is unreservedly recommended.