“A volume the size of a novel and produced to high standards, The Quest is in three books which add up to more than 200 well-set-out pages. Life as a quest for meaning is a common notion but this is an almost eighteenth century enterprise, though not an antiquarian one.
George Ames who read for an MSc in Ecology at Bangor is like many of the present youngish generation, unable to accept the lights of Science - not only in their ‘perverted’ form as Churchill said of the Nazis but almost because they exist and seem not to allow of other ways of human comprehension. It’s a question Wordsworth tried to grasp in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 where he talks about the Poet domesticating scientific discovery into the human house. George Ames finds the animal by now a ravening Bogle so out with it!
Learning and Significance abound. The reader is amazed and aghast: this is white-water experience, the only thing is to hang on until you get to the shore. It is a work difficult to quote from, but wherever you dip your hand the water is white.”
(from Other Poetry, Vol.2:10)