Like the work of the European poets who have nourished him, David
Constantine's poetry is informed by a profoundly humane vision of the
world. In his title-poem - which illuminates the themes of the whole
book - the lovers are a utopian answering back against the curse
(following a crime against Nature) that is carried by the ship passing
above them.
Throughout these poems, the personal life, with its own joys and
suffering, asserts itself against a world whose characteristic forces
are dispiriting and destructive. Nine Fathom Deep shows how all
personal life and all poetry written from it deal with the realities of
social and political life in the here and now, assert themselves, fight
for survival, and actively seek to make a world in which humane
self-realisation would be more and more, not less and less, possible.