By PHILIP LARKIN. Edited by ARCHIE BURNETT.

Reviewed by PAUL MULDOON - New York Times

Illustration by Iain Burke

This sprawling collection of Philip Larkin’s work is accompanied by extensive commentary.

Philip Larkin’s body of work is so slender and, often, so seemingly slight, so devoid of belly fat and blather, as to make Elizabeth Bishop (whom I now think of as his nearest American counterpart) look like a blimp and a bigmouth. Of the 730 pages of “The Complete Poems,” a mere 90 are taken up by those poems Larkin saw fit to collect in his lifetime. One of the main challenges posed by this edition is that it asks us to reconcile the discrepancy between those slim 90 pages and the sprawling rest.

Read Muldoon's review at The New York Times.