Often what is shown is the monument remote from the observer as if what is being expressed is its distance in time and its probable irrelevance in the public mind. Other memorials have only fragments showing, as if only bits or aspects of what is memorialised survive, and carefully included extraneous details appear to have a telling substitute presence. And while some monuments are seen centrally and frontally in the rather stylized grandiose manner appropriate to the occasion of their erection, others are seen marginalized, just objects among other objects, apparently no more significant than telephone boxes, bus-shelters or dustbins.
 
But the dead are not therefore seen as mocked or diminished, for they are seen in that particular way which suggests that they have merely taken their place among the later priorities of those living in a different time. So although there is a sense of displacement and obscurity, of grand lives or moments caught in the momentum of erasure, the dominant tone is not sorrow or regret.
 
And John Daniel's perspective doesn't let anything stay sombre for long. His poems go deep into the social and personal meaning of lost times and are tender and exact. They have the strong close textures of things really experienced, so he never loses his balance and always returns to the glad surface of life. Continuing in the same affirmative spirit as his most recent volume Missing the Boat, he shows himself to be a poet who never puts himself out of reach of laughter.

War Memorial to those lost at sea in two World Wars 1914–18 and 1939–45, Plymouth Hoe
 
Art Deco lions more modern
than they would ever see, 23,000 names
in bronze, a telephone directory
we forget or never knew, receding
 
like their jobs: trimmer, leading stoker,
sailmaker, blacksmith, bugler
and the places where they died –
Heligoland, Jutland, Coronel, the Dardanelles.
 
A few steps down stone arms embrace
that other war. Far too many a man says
walking past a wreath of poppies
 
propped against the wall, dry roses
and a pot of cyclamen rolled over
under piled-up clouds, a living sea and mourning gulls.