Italian Visitor

'The Italian Visitor' opens with 'The Andrians', an amibivalent extended elegy for the Cold War. Gowrie then evokes the childhood of a 'forties child', making his way to the vocation of poetry in a Britain emerging from the Second World War. He follows with a miscellany of recent poems and the light verses which eased him through years of public service, concluding with a prose memoir of his friendship with Robert Lowell.