The Cleansing of the Knife and other poems by Naomi Mitchison (1978)

This was Mitchison's extremely belated second volume of verse, following The Laburnum Branch in 1926, and I have to say that, largely, it wasn't "worth the wait". There is a quality in this work of vagueness and inattention to detail which pushes the reader to one side. This is most evident in terms of rhyming schemes - they are wandering, variable, and sometimes inept. It's also evident in her treatment of the subject matter, but this reveals itself in a complex way: any given small set of lines reads reasonably, but the overall hit in the memory, the picture-making and emotion-revealing, seen as a whole, is limp and pale. There are some concessions to greater beauty; three poems from deep inside the Second World War entitled The Farm Woman: 1942, The Farmer and Her Cows and The Burial of Elie Gras (the last a translation from Diamant-Berger) are more strongly coloured and pinpointed in their telling. But that war also produced the most disappointing piece, the long title poem, which unfortunately palely stutters on about Scotland and its future, and vaguely mumbles over its harsh past, with short sequences here and there being much more effective.