This is autobiography disguised as verse, as Lawrence freely admits in the Foreword, asking us to treat these sixty poems as a single narrative covering the ‘sixth lustre’ of his life, whatever that means. They are full of the endless wail of frustration that characterises Lawrence - understandably enough from a chronic bronchial sufferer who must have known he would die young, living under house arrest for the duration of the war, virtually unable to publish, sometimes literally starving, and with a highly-sexed German wife, deeply mistrusted by the authorities, to be kept satisfied into the bargain.

The mystery is why he would have called it “Look! We have come through!” in 1917, when he was evicted from his Cornish village home because they thought he was signalling to enemy submarines, and was facing life as a fugitive, with no end to the war in sight. We can only suppose that he had a psychological need to fantasise about the day of liberation, which duly arrived twelve long months later.

The familiar Lawrentian theme of full-blooded emotional living dominates the collection, but most of it is over-personalised and so fails to touch a nerve in the reader. He often seems to be addressing his wife and himself at the same time, a clue to their close bonding that survived many tests. ‘Birth Night’ is an obscure piece, apparently celebrating the child they never had. ‘Loggerheads’ sounds like a full-blown domestic row, but gives us the only lines possibly worth quoting:

Take my words, and fling
Them down on the counter roundly;
See if they ring.

Others are clearly sharing memories of happier moments on their travels, but again not in a way that engages the reader. ‘River Roses’ is vaguely haunting, but we don’t need to know that they’re on the less-known river Isar. Equally, ‘Fireflies in the corn’ is obviously recreating a cherished moment, but it’s too much like looking at other people’s holiday snaps.

Most satisfactory (and satisfying) of all is a short poem ‘Giorni di morti’ which, unusually, sticks to formal metre and rhyme, and avoids the Whitmanesque free-verse form that Lawrence found so tempting for his angry diatribes.