One Another

In his introduction to Peter Dale''s Edge to Edge: New & Selected Poems, Grey Gowrie wrote: "Except for his Villon translations ... which stand among the great modern translations ... Peter Dale has been neglected in reputation ... He is the long-distance runner of his generation and it is exciting to follow his development. His lines ring true because that is precisely what they are." Central to Dale''s poetic achievement is One Another, a sequence of sixty sonnets that deals with a long-term relationship between a man and a woman, and which, to adapt Gowrie''s words, succeeds in telling the complicated truth about that relationship – what was and wasn''t communicable, what was and wasn''t shareable – by employing constantly shifting temporal and emotional perspectives. As the poet himself has described it, the sequence resembles "a kaleidoscope – with perhaps an unusual amount of dark fragments in it – each turn of which discloses a new pattern, a different constellation." Writing about One Another''s first edition, the critic William Bedford wrote: [This is] "a substantial work in which the fusion of narrative line and poetic intensity is complete ... One Another is a fine book, ambitious and serious in its themes, using language carefully and quietly to explore ideas first touched on in The Storms. It is also a brave and generous book, using respectfully a much maligned form ... Such a combination of ambition and reticence seems to me to be essentially part of Dale''s achievement ... as a poet, an achievement that has a great deal to do with seriousness and with courtesy. One Another is both a confirmation and a development of his talent."