"Stitching in the dark" by Carole Satyamurti (Bloodaxe, 2005)

A New and Selected, with new poems from Ambit, The Interpreter's House, Magma, Poetry London, Poetry Review, The Rialto, etc. Exposure is online. She won the National Poetry Competition for Between the lines before she had a book published.

She's consistently good, and in various ways - playful, thoughtful, observational, ekphrastic, etc. A dozen pages or so from the new section can serve as a sample - lots of range, as befits a poetry teacher

• "On Not Going Anywhere" - in reply to "Where did the sun go when it set?" the persona replies "the sun doesn't go anywhere. Like us.// Perhaps you mean it's not going/ to the Registry Office, the Nationwide,/ the ante-natal class. There, I agree with you./ But neither is it going to the wall, the dogs ...
• "Lust in Translation" - musing on Love and French films - "a condition like hayfever or a craving/ for celeriac: something seasonal and a yawn, except/ to fellow sufferers"
• "The Oldest Story" - 4 little sub-poems, mostly rhyming. They fall short of wry.
• "Cabaret Song" - shades of Pam Ayres
• "Fable" - using rhyme and repetition
• "Confidence" - a long anecdote with a plot - "A good lie's an achievement, like tightrope walking ... Every lie, or poem, is autobiographical"
• "Immigrants" - 30 lines about how immigrants into the States changed their names. I can see how that might be a tempting topic.
• "Playing with Words at Abu Ghraib" - moral outrage, ending with imagined extracts from a child's book - "This is fun says Lynndie/ This is fun says Chip"
• "Give Me a Piece of Your Mind, Fat Man" - "Let my sex astonish people, since they hadn't reckoned on it. Let me give orders without apologetic fidgeting. I want to know your dolphin buoyancy in water, your understated footwork on the dance floor"

Good, though nothing dazzles. There's a sense of being on auto-pilot - "Our lives are castles cancelled by the sea;/ loss is the very grain of us" (p.31). "Death of a Dancer" keeps up its dance/death imagery, going through a list of easily generated ideas until reaching a more interesting conclustion - "We were a kind of company. But he couldn't choreograph/ the way our minds slide now towards prosecco./ Or how the pigeons move on their own flight paths,/ innocent of sorrow, free without knowing it" I'm usually in favour of notes, but I don't think she needed to add "Prosecco: a sparkling wine drunk as an aperitif". The woman in "The Power of Prayer" eats only grapefruit as a wonder cure - the word is almost an anagram of "Repair-gut". At the end, and rather predictably, people never knew "whether the tumour shrank/ before she died of malnutrition".

When she wrote her first book there were more urgent topics - I like the "Broken Moon" poem, the second half of "Intensive Care". Her "Changing the subject" book has crises too - the title poem's subsection "Knowing Our Place" begins "Class is irrelevant in here./ We're part of a new scale -/ mobility is all one way/ and the least respected are envied most.// First, the benigns ... Then the exploratories ... Terminals are royalty ... We learn the social map/ fast. Beneath the ordinary chat,/ jokes, kindnesses, we're scavengers,/ gnawing at each other's histories/ for scraps of hope."

When she strays too far from her main styles, I'm less convinced -

• "Poppies" is in dialect - "he really like me, it me he lookin' at/ like it the first always."
• In "Cutting Loose" "His feet make jet-streams. He rides in the bowl of his pelvis like a millionaire and he sheds desire for the squared-up scraps of lives in the lighted windows as his leg-springs carry him through streets speckled with the whites of eyes, past coke can and condom, the newsprint beds of the rootless, birthday-less"

though I like "The Uncertainty of the Poet".

The "Sister Ship" sequence, about the "Herald of Free Enterprise" fails to grab me.

Typo on p.227 - "Whereas a sold melts suddenly when heated"

Other reviews

• Kathryn Gray (transformation seems not the key it would be for many poets – rather, everything seems to possess a shifting value that denies any real classification or closure. It is an effective method in keeping the reader on their toes and alert to the nuances. Satyamurti is also unobtrusively formal; she possesses a real naturalness in rhyme. ... While I prize the fugitive in Satyamurti, however, sometimes I did wish I could pin her down more.)