"Collecting bottle tops" by William Bedford (Poetry Salzburg, 2009)

Selected poems from Acumen, Critical Quarterly, Daily Mail, South, etc. On the face of it he's been more successful in other genres with a novel published by Picador, a drama on BBC radio 4, and several books for children (Heinemann, Bodley Head, etc).

In the 8 page introduction, Sam Milne often uses Bedford's comments/essays about others to help describe the poet's own approach e.g. - "the poetry that must resolve the tensions that are analysed in the prose", going on to say that "he retains an Anglo-Saxon grip on reality throughout without hanging too much "on the edge of darkness" ... it has a sense of the significance of the European and North American cultural heritage that much of contemporary poetry lacks". Milne's short-list of Bedford's influences includes Keats, Simone Weil, Brecht, Said, Lowell, Stevens, Lawrence and Wittgenstein. He writes that Bedford admires Geoffrey Hill, Peter Dale and Donald Davie.

I wasn't particularly struck by anything in the 1960-1975 section. I thought that "Using words,/ you have told me you are leaving,// and my loneliness/ is like the beginning of water,/ rained from a summer sky" (p.33) was a little awkward.

Rhyme is more common in the 1984-1999 section. The 18 sections of "The Redlit Boys" are packed with nostalgia - "the rattle of milkbottles in cobbled streets// red doorsteps shining in a drenched dawn./ When rag-and-bone men offered goldfish/ for used jam jars and tattered cloths" (p.105). The final section of poems 2006-2008 is entitled "Cold Stars", maybe partly because so many dead stars of poetry/thinking are mentioned - Verlaine, Simone Weil, Wallace Stevens, Plath, Keats, Robert Lowell. There are several dedications to friends/relatives too. I think it's my favourite section - I like "Poem for Verlaine", "Flirting", etc. There's quite a lot about dreaming and waking, about remembering as if in a dream. Oxford. Women. There are rushes of imagery that earlier sections don't have - e.g. "the injured litter the streets/ like turds,/ like cowpats of innards and eyes,/ the way hens lay their own stomachs,/ force-fed on foreign musicals/ to produce golden eggs" (p.196)

The poems are often gloomy about love -

• What we choose, goes out of fashion./ What we love, simply goes (end of p.59)
• Stopping at this town one night/ of winter rain/ might offer some sort of meaning,/ a break with illusion/ to tell us where our love died (p.61)
• To this, our love will take us,/ the knowledge that loneliness clarifies,/ the escape from loss into tedium (p.74)
• We only remember being unhappy,/ or what is written about being unhappy/ in other people's poems ... Reading poetry was ... a way of seeing the figures outside the cave (p.190)

Nature offers consolation. Time and light are busy -

• light, fingering the surprised hedgerows (p.34)
• Time, in surprise,/ stands still (p.46)
• Hours are herded in this pink light (p.56)
• the year will eventually turn brittle,// broken before anyone anticipated (p.62)
• the park air glistens,/ herded towards evening (p.66)
• Through frozen hedgerows, time leaks (p.79)
• sunlight draining through nicotined curtains (p.108)

There are less consciously poetic lines too - I like "We will laugh at the young milkman, struggling with the garden gate" (p.115)