The cloud of unknowing/Never far away/From the fog of ignorance
This is delicious. It probably represents the final flowering of a not specially distinguished career (Thwaite is best known as Larkin's biographer and his editor before the new Complete) but every one of these poems, some sixty in total, is perfectly achieved; they have been ripened over nearly ten years, and it shows. I look forward to the anthology of the over-seventies (Fleur Adcock, Alan Brownjohn, Clive James, Lotte Kramer (now 'on the Underground'!), the late Peter Porter) that I hope someone is contemplating as we speak