For Keith Douglas, the North African desert war confirmed the thinness of the partition that divided him from an unknown dimension, and his writings of the period register a mounting conviction of his approaching end and, with it, a sense of the urgency of bringing his life's work to a consummation in the short space remaining to him. The result is these astonishing final poems into which the doomed poet has tried to concentrate all the experience he would ever and could never have.