He depends rather heavily on lists ("9.A.M" is typical with fairly randomly ordered observations until the final one), and is happy to write about minor matters (e.g. "Buying a letterbox"). The earlier poems seem too slight to me, and there are too many poems like "The Celtic Tiger" which look like decanted notebooks of observations - "Outside new antique pubs, young consultants/ - well-toned women, gel-slick men -/ drain long-necked bottles of imported beer.// Lip-glossed cigarettes are poised/ at coy angles, a black bra strap/ slides strategically from a Rocha top". Some of the poetic additions to the observations sound forced - "Dry-gulleted drains gulp down neat rain" (p.56). The "End of the peach season" villanelle seems especially average. "Coming of age" ends with "my sister, below the age for admittance to the wards, was plied with goodies in the hospital shop: all the chocolate she could cope with, all the fizzy orange she could drink", which would have been a telling aside in a story. Here though the 10 added line-breaks don't help.
I liked "Votive candles" - "One lighting the next like a nervous chain smoker's cigarette: little rockets, boosters, launched to heaven". "Churchyard view: the new estate" is a long piece in fragments, some of which I like - "The child's coffin/ like a violin case./ A pitch which parents' ears/ can hear through clay ... Two sisters who wished each other dead languish side by side. ... Plots divided like vegetable allotments ... Those who discover an aptitude for death they never had for life ... As you were built on bone,/ your house was built on sand./ Not a stone will stand upon stone.// A painted wall is a white lie./ You will crumble to the ground./ Your house will sicken, die".
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