"Old men" by Peter Daniels (Salt, 2024)

Poems from "High Window", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "London Grip", etc.

There's rhyme (e.g. "Two Uncles"), there are poems where the approach seems to be "When in doubt spell it out" (his most common mode), and poems which leave much to the imagination: I wouldn't call them difficult or obscure - for a start, there's always a surface clarity - but it's unclear what the pieces are "about". There are prose interludes, some as long as a poem -

• In "A Map", sitting at the piano, he most likes looking at the music. There's a plan to go fishing with a friend, but he has no idea about fishing. At 7 he was interested in men but unsure why. Then there's "How what you like moves you into being/ who you've become: he has no idea what/ you might need to do to make it happen.// In the long days before growing up, he can/ spend the whole time drawing a map/ of an elaborate city that will never exist." (p.9)
• "I used to take evening primrose oil, which I thought was good for/ depression till I found it was St John's wort for that,/ and evening primrose is meant for pre-menstrual tension" (p.16)
• "In the shower" is the clearest example of prose set-up and poetic pay-off - the persona has set up their phone so that they can see some one else showering and vice versa. "I've propped it by its leather case, book-like, angled perfectly to open my own body like a book ... while you in your bathroom, somewhere I've never been, open your body ... and we watch each other shower down whatever held us back, and the water takes it away" (p.24)

Also,

• "A Metaphor" begins with "If old men are trees". It reminded me of James Lasdun's "The Locals" though they share no phrases - Lasdun's has "They peopled landscapes casually like trees, ... and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands."
• "Empty Boxes" begins the way I often begin poems - "A seashell has been emptied of its owner, but/ a box begins as itself, with a need to enclose". I'd suffocate the poem with o'erleaping imagery about Self. He calmly concludes with "The shoes and sweets/ are elsewhere now, but Pandora's things/ will still be jostling us, they mock our boxes"
• I like "The Laundry" - 16 "abab" stanzas starting with "As I was walking down Higgledy-Piggledy Lane/ I thought I smelt the truth,/ that beauty is the answer,/ and the rest is all uncouth." Shades of James Fenton.
• On p.55 there's "As the earth heaves, the clatter of syllogisms/ where it opens up, logic falls and consequences slide" which is a bit of a surprise because his symbolism is usually much more concrete than this.

In the 4th section of the book is a 13 page poem that I've written about elsewhere - see Happy and Fortunate