Although the pack leaders among the original (1960's 70's) Penguin Modern Poets might seem to have emerged long ago, there are still unexpected late surges. D.M. Black (who appeared in Volume 11 in 1968 alongside Peter Redgrove and another D.M. - Thomas) was born in South Africa, brought up in Scotland, and is now in his mid-seventies. The Arrow Maker reminds us of his gifts. The poems tend to be conversational in tone, and written in a free or loosely accentual line, as in the title poem, which makes a strong opening to this, his seventh collection. Black favours what over how, preferring to focus on a definite task, a particular person in a particular place ("George Fox in Lichfield", "An African Exile in Australia"), a provocative idea, an observed incident (the man who swings his "blockish cases" onto the Tube as the doors close and sees them swept away from him). "An Unexpected Intimacy" begins simply "This afternoon I picked up a warm stone", and becomes a genial exercise (in one sentence of nineteen long lines) in imaginative empathy with "a life that had been in progress for millions of years" before the narrator disturbed it. There is a spiritual undercurrent here (as there was in early poems of Black's such as "Kew Gardens") which grows more evident towards the middle of the book with a monologue for St Augustine, a reflection on the Trinity, "Saint Francis in Winter" and "The Buddah Amitabha". The voice is that of a poet who has long since learnt to follow the right instinct.
The Arrow Maker culminates in Black's translation of extracts from Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso, but the idea of translating lies behind many of these poems, even when they are about climate change or an asylum seeker. In "The Uses of Mythology", for example, Ezra Pound is depicted as "high on half-read heroes", gulled by a "fraudster's bombast", "some Bottom-with-the-head-of-a-donkey" - a character who was himself "translated". This is one of a few poems in which D.M. Black becomes rather too improvisatory and the pace begins to slacken. But generally, outsider or not, this is a poet very much in the running.