"Towards the waiting sun" by Glen Cavaliero (Poetry Salzburg, 2011)

Poems from Granta, Poetry Salzburg Review and Delta, though he's had other things in The New Yorker, PN Review, Stand and the TLS (he's a fellow of the RSL).

In the introduction, Peter Scupham writes that "In a poetic climate which is choc-a-bloc with relativism ... this collection obstinately assumes the need for poetry to move the human heart". The 4 sections are "Dissolution", "Unlucky Numbers", "Here and There" and "Springboard".

There's quite a range of difficulty - of language and allusion. This stanza for example starts simply enough, but the meaning of the final 2 lines is lost on me.

But spring's a cheat, old men agree, and sagely they eschew the whore, repenting of their little spree and doing crosswords as before, though some of them resent their loss since life itself prevents their rest - hosanna knowledge of the cross constricted to the second best. ("Lament")

Some of the pieces are easy-going - knowingly so sometimes, though not in this poem (from the "Here and There" section, which is the lightest of the 4) -

August here's not bad, the fields are golden, spread like enormous rugs around the contours of a bulge in the ground you would not call a hill. ... The elms are all down of course that used to stand beside the church. And that's marooned in a field Nobody wants to cross ("Thingworth")

"Crosswords" might be very clever/cryptic. I don't understand it. I don't understand "Left about Turn". And the following from "Among the Farthest Hebrides" sounds stodgy

Forlorn in the salty gale I retain the bitter sense that though I am watched whichever way I turn everything that I know and feel would still be met with an indifference so complete as to annihilate all but the safety of the dead

"Ancestral Haunt" by Glen Cavaliero (Poetry Salzburg, 2002)

Selected Poems, with a useful introduction by D.M. de Silva. The poems are from The Rialto, Stand, the Cambridge University's Po-Soc magazine "Virtue without Terror", etc. He's also appeared in the TLS and the New Yorker! I can't get into his style though. All the pieces are sonnet-length or longer, many being more than a page.

I'm puzzled by the indentation and content at the start of "Ha-Ha"

The Archduke has laid his lap dogs in the grave.           There's a fine how-do-you-do      underneath the terrace where a sundial moved      last night, backwards. Now the new giant housemaid      has spread the heat out upon the lawns to dry. See how it steams: the children are quite lost in it.

"On Parade" starts with

No stone to mark the spot: it's an entry in a register     secures them, hooked to the generating tree by a legislated testament. A plot of grass, a space     assured between the shouldering monuments and obelisks and exhortatory angels that commemorate     the much-loved fathers, sleeping children, wives and devoted husbands who have gone before

I don't see the point of that first sentence's wordiness, and the list later in the extract goes on for too long. He has a weakness for twisting idioms. For example, "Foremothers" ends with

Madame Cain (Jill the Ripper to friends) in Eve's place now, ponders her men, knows herself matchless, with no bridges burned.

Too much seems gratuitously flowery. On "Fox Earth" "Outside, the gloom's now absolute: grief-offerings/ are brought for you to fold them/ in your ironic nothingness". I prefer the later pieces, where the floweriness is more functional - "Tethered to its nest by a cord of song, the lark still flowers" ("An Encounter"). I liked "A Green Grave" and "The Hope Stone".

The book was reviewed by Peter Scupham in PN Review back in 2002 ("formally adroit, various in tone"), and by Glyn Pursglove in Acumen ("shrewd in his observation of human nature (not least his own), attentive to that mood of place which is generated by the simultaneous presence of past and present and technically assured in his articulation of relatively fugitive emotions and sensations") - see http://www.poetrysalzburg.com/haunt.htm.