In both the exposure of a very broad personal sensitivity and the exploitation of language by rhetoric, imagery, meter, and rhyme, Ewart pushes all the old familiar, (and very unfamiliar) possibilities. He is unafraid of the positive declarations of sentiment (or affection) for wife, son, daughter; cats, experimental animals, inequities of Northern Ireland and the City of London; and sex... He could be hailed as the most persuasive celebrator of heterosexual lovehate since D.H. Lawrence. Praising the female in her every form—infant, girlfriend; mother, mistress, wife; bitch, goddess, witch, muse, friend—this preoccupation is a hopeless yet happy obsession. He denies it and adores it in something akin to the itch and agony of Rochester, Herrick, and Swift. It's the flesh that arouses and repels, tantalizes and mesmerizes, in all of its odors, wetness, fur, balefulness, and bliss.

It is not only that he writes so many poems: what he writes is so extraordinarily varied. The Gavin Ewart Show is clever, farcical, literate, fantastic, indecent, and above all very funny. It is also rueful, affectionate, self-parodying, introspective. And, finally, it is sombre, unerringly realistic (‘the fox’s teeth are in the bunny/ and nothing can remove them, honey’), evoking rather than exploring illness, old age, loss, death.