Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

To adapt F Scott Fitzgerald, there are few second acts in literary lives any more. Ambitious young authors will often have a single strike at goal. If the debut shot gets lost in the crowd - back to the day job. It was not always so. Imagine a writer - of poetry, fiction, memoir - who publishes under the same imprint for 60 years. He starts in 1948. In 2007, he releases (by my rough count) his 27th title with one publisher. It sounds as improbable as a dodo waddling through Soho Square. Much more remarkable than mere durability, the new work turns out to be a supremely fresh and vital performance, matching profound emotion with witty observation. This is no dodo, but a bloody phoenix.

What's more, the phoenix never did give up the day job. Dannie Abse, poet and physician, carried on wearing the "white coat" of medicine and the "purple coat" of art right up his retirement in 1989 after decades of service as a chest specialist. After that, the writer who has mined the blended Welsh and Jewish seams of his identity so fruitfully carried on delivering high-carat gems. Then, in June 2005, his wife of 54 years, Joan - art historian and anti-nuclear activist - died instantly in the motorway accident that badly injured her husband.

Last year's collection, Running Late, included a few, typically well-wrought, poems about his loss. Now comes a memoir, The Presence (Hutchinson, £15.99): a personal journal which joins reflections on bereavement, memories of marriage and anecdotes about friends with a selection of poems - both Abse's own, and favourites from masters such as Hardy and Hughes, Pasternak and Cavafy. One hesitates to gush under the inspection of such a tough-minded, keen-eyed diagnostician. Just for once, who cares? This is a truly marvellous book.

Yes, it proves as tender and touching as admirers will expect. Thoughts of Joan, and the vast void of her absence, transform the widower into "a veritable onion, a storehouse of tears". You will never read a stronger, pithier expression of what it is like to live under "the benign tyranny of a most loved ghost". But this grief, however devastating, did not happen to anyone; it happened to Abse, with all his curiosity and ingenuity. "I'm lost in a foreign city, and have to stop to read myself as if I were a map." What a reader; what a map.

So we have the deftly-placed scattering of vivid poems. We have the neatly crafted, often hilarious episodes from the past, from eccentric medical mentors (one, Dr Ernie Lloyd with his lectures on "the old 'eart", straight out of Under Milk Wood) to the incredibly antique but still perfect joke told him in Golders Green Road by Siegmund Nissel of the great Amadeus Quartet. (You want it? You buy.)

Warmly funny tales of friends and family - especially his brothers, the Labour MP Leo and psychiatrist Wilfred - alternate with sharply drawn scenes of writers and even celebrities. Uri Geller has a cameo, as do Maureen Lipman, Jacqueline du Pré and Spike Milligan. Braced for the chill gales of grief, the reader feels uncannily tickled by the merry breeze of a gossipy showbiz memoir.

Underneath the dancing runs of this unstoppable mind ticks the metronome of loss. Its tempo dictates the book, which often reverts from the music of renewing life to "the silence of the abyss". Yet out of this absence a presence forms, as spectral but revealing as the X-rays that Abse scanned for so long. As another poet wrote, "What will survive of us is love" - although the shrewdly grounded Abse has none of Larkin's hidden rancour, nor his fits of self-pity. "All I can do is utter words," he writes, "some washed in tears, though I know they may affect the speaker more than the hearer". For once, Dr Abse's prognosis is entirely incorrect.

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