Descola provides a wealth of information on the mores of the Achuar, their religion, cosmology, attitude to sex, hunting habits, and so on. But why should this interest a general audience? To become significant Descola's material needs a wider context. Unfortunately in this book the context is provided by two myths: the Noble Savage and the status of Claude Levi-Strauss as the Copernicus of anthropology. Descola is po-faced and politically correct. Determined that his savages be noble, he explains away the intense Achuar prejudice against homosexuality as follows: "The reprobation prompted by such behaviour expresses not so much a moral judgement as repugnance in the face of any confusion between domains and categories whose absolute separation is deemed necessary for the world to run properly." The polygamous Achuar do not treat their women well, so Descola goes to the moon and back trying to show that they are not really "sexist." Cultural relativism reaches its apogee when Descola witnesses a man brutally beating his wife. The true cultural gap revealed by this volume is not that between civilisation and barbarism but between the Gallic/structural and the Anglo-Saxon/empirical.

After 16 years' lucubration he produced this account of his two years among the Indians. His book was apparently received with rapture when first published in France in 1993. But a British reader, familiar with the flood of material that has appeared recently on Amazonian tribes, may well wonder what all the fuss is about. Philippe Descola is a Parisian academic who in 1976-78 lived with the Jivaro Achuar tribe in the jungle on the Ecuador-Peru border, near the headwaters of the Amazon. ''The Strand at Lough Beg: In Memory of Colum McCartney'' is a very fine piece of interiorised grieving.

But its awesome quietness signifies the continuing acceptance of what Auden and the rest settled for after Spain, namely that ''poetry makes nothing happen'' because it's a quite private pursuit which the ''executives'' can ignore and need never ''tamper" with The poetic aftermath of Spain has a lot to answer for.. Thus Donald Davie's emblematic Movement poem, ''Remembering the Thirties'', remembering the imperative enthusiasms that led Auden and Co to Spain only as an occasion for debunking. It was, evidently, the wide feeling that such coolness was the most appropriate tonal approach which led to Larkin's unofficial elevation as the British people's laureate.To measure the continuing life of such poetic reserve in our islands, one need think only of Seamus Heaney's characteristic verses about the dementing horrors of current Irish politics, in which rage, say, at the killing of a cousin in some ''faked road block'' is subdued, Spanish-fashion, into merely a private lament. And if the poetic ''Movement'' of the Fifties went in for neutral tones, deeply suspicious of larger rhetorics and poetic chance-taking, this too can be put down to the aftermath of Spain.'''Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!' They lounged away".

But its poems and novels tend to be laconic and downbeat, grey as a ration book, gloomy as an air-raid shelter. You'd have thought the Second World War was a crusade moral enough to warrant poetic cheerleading. He produced a great roster of elegies for dead writers - Housman, Edward Lear, Matthew Arnold, W B Yeats - who seem to stand for the demise of all writerly optimism. It's as if, after Spain, Auden's only comfort is in standing at the grave of an era, the place where (as his ''September 1, 1939'' puts it) ''the clever hopes'', ''Of a low dishonest decade" have simply expired.This sobering of English poetry is something we have still not recovered from. It's why there has been no literary triumphalism about any of the wars Britain has been engaged in since the end of the Thirties. After "Spain", his poems became packed with cynical images of gratuitous deaths and narratives of needless killing.