Published: 4 March 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

THE last time we met was at the re-opening of Keats House, in Hampstead, after its magnificent restoration. I had been looking round the refurbished Keats’ bedroom with its grand four-poster and plush pillows and suggested he took a look too.

“Is there any blood on the sheets?” he asked sanguinely.

Dannie Abse, like Keats, he is a physician and a poet, and an expert once on chest diseases. So he knows all about the horrendous effects of the TB that killed Keats. And how his tragic short life left behind a haunting story of his unfulfilled love for Fanny Brawne, now to be read, amid the dew drops, in romantic poetry and prose that is among the finest in our literature.

Dannie knows about grief too, following the death of his wife Joan in a car crash in his native Wales five years ago

Now 86, it haunts him, as he wrote in his poem called Lachrymae: 

“I went to her funeral/ I cried/ I went home that was not home.” 

Yet, significantly, it is that gruelling grief that keeps him alive, to recall their early days of marriage in Hampstead before moving to Golders Green, and provides him with the magic key with which to write.

“All my memories begin with We,” he explains. “Memory is the father of tears. I’m still in love with my wife, and that’s the trouble.”

Yet that trouble, that everlasting love, has resulted in Two For Joy: Scenes From Married Life, some 50 poems, more than half of them newly written as he continues to mourn the past. 

More importantly, he celebrates too – with tender passion and playful pride and delight – a great marriage that survives in his heart.

His grace and simplicity makes it all look so easy. But as all true poets know, the lines do not come easily. So ponder them in this pocket-sized memorial to a wonderful and brave wife that symbolises the best of marriage.

Dannie tells us of the Sumerian proverb that says “A man’s wife is his destiny”, and in the poem Anniversary, composed on Primrose Hill, writes:

“What happens to a flame blown out?/ What perishes?/ Not this view/ nor my magnified hand in yours/ whatever hurt and angers done.”

Bravo for love – and Dannie Abse.

• Two for Joy: Scenes From Married Life. By Dannie Abse. Hutchinson £15