"Suit of lights" by Damian Walford Davies (Seren, 2009)

Let's start with the first poem, "Bee". It's in couplets, thought it's unclear why. There are line-breaks in mid-word ("be-/ing", "we-/ight") which aren't to do with meter, rhyme, or syllabics. A bee keeps trying to enter the narrator's room at a window. "When I/ found it humbled, downed, its body// pulsing on the gravel, I thought I should/ have opened up and let her in, if only// for her trying ten, twelve, times without/ my thinking once (for once) of stings". Why the transition from "it" to "her"? Anything to do with it being dedicated to Francesca?

The second poem, "Bird" has alternate lines all indented by the same amount - about half a page-width. The ending is

the way out trans-                parent into hot and heterodox light.

Is "parent" significant? I tried reading the poem column-wise rather than line by line, but that didn't help.

"Heraldic" is neatly plotted. It begins well with "When the stag stepped out of some rich man's dark, I was pushing seventy. The scene collapsed to symbols" (I'll spare you the quote's 3 line-breaks and stanza break, and the line-broken word). At the end the driver (who's pushing 70 mph, not 70 years) stops thinking and brakes.

"Iconoclast" is a boring list made even worse by being broken into short-lined couplets.

Each section of "Kilvert" begins with a quote from an old diary that sometimes upstages the poem. The best were

• It was the first time I had seen clergyman's daughters helping to castrate lambs ... they carried it off enormously well ... They held them like cellos
• on dark nights, the gentlemen pulled out the tails of their shirts and walked before to show the way and light the ladies ... For every Jill a jack-o'-lantern, a suit of lights

"Green George" includes "an indi-//fferent audience" and "onto a Gol-/gotha meadow of camp-//anula". "Aerial" includes this -

sending             ser-                ations of sudden                green                          birds

"ations" and "green" are equally indented. "ser-" and "birds" are equally indented. Concrete poetry, representing the flight formation? The 4th section has "pathology of peninsular/ ground in scar-//lets, lilacs, creams". The 5th section (quoted here without the typographic bling) is "Smoke from gorse fires - the year detonates in seed-pods and spikes. Burnt ground forgets itself in air, recalls itself as cloud"

"Loft Gothic" is in couplets, the 2nd line of each stanza indented. It includes "looking for a brief ec-/lipse of life downstairs". "The Destroying Angels" has "you man-/aged to heat" and "fruit-/ ing into stipe and cloud/ we dare not pic-/ture".

I think he's best in brief bursts. I find the formats misleading. They look as if they're meaningful but they're not. My suspicion is that the texts have been chopped into lines that give the visual impression of a form, the poet then taking advantage of any opportunities the line-breaks might then provide to offer puns, etc. Word-splitting is sporadic, and the pay-off sometimes minimal.

Other reviews

• Matt Merritt (Walford Davies breaks the line halfway through 'being', turning what might otherwise be a mundane sentence into a pun. It's a device he repeats at regular intervals throughout this collection, and I still can't make up my mind how effective it is. ... later in the same poem he breaks the word 'weight' between lines. Almost impossible to read, you might think, but in fact it works well in the context of working with something fragile, tiny, "a fraction of an ounce". ... For the most part, he's a broadly mainstream poet, usually at his best when dealing with subjects drawn from history, landscape or art ... a collection that's as rich and well-achieved as any I've come across in a while)