A "New and Selected" with poems from Ambit, The Listener, London Magazine, LRB, Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, BBC, etc. Sometimes 3 poems (or parts of them) are squeezed onto a page.
I didn't mind "Time and Motion" or maybe "Trunk Call", but in the first 40 pages I'd hoped to have been impressed by more than a poem or two. It's too light and chatty for me - anecdotes, descriptions with similes, wistful insights, etc. And yet, I don't think I understand the "News from the Front" poems - they're beyond me. With the selection from "The Sea at the door" we're back to before. I like "Bride Ship" but immediately after there's "Creil". "The Life to Come" has rudundancy that doesn't seem rhetorical. "Jigsaw Puzzle" takes a while to say what I and others have said too. It's surprising to find that such poems have been "selected".
There are over 55 pages of new poems. "The Big One" is based on a good-enough idea, and works, though it should be shorter. "Couple, Probably Adulterous" could have worked, were it shorter. I liked the observations in "Parting". "1944" takes the tendency to be prosy too far.
"Dirty Washing" is 8 24-line poems - triplets, though no syllable/rhyme scheme (I think the occasional rhyme/assonance is chance rather than terza rima). "Windy Money" is ok. "Morning! And the light streaks in like bacon" (p.105) fails for me. In p.107 there's
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The Church looms like a paradox. I step back from its hunchbacked shadow to a shaft of sunlight slanted biblically on a weathered slab. |
shows what she can do, but then there's this on p.109
| Apples, Acorns, Apricots - whole orchards of computers - shed kernels, cores and pips, like litterbugs. |
Poems on p.112-114 are too relaxed.
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