"Found Wanting" by Hugh Underhill (Smokestack, 2008)

If you want things louder, more loudspeakers aren't enough - you can fill a field with iPod headphones and still hear nothing above the bees. It's the same with imagery. These poems have a steady buzz. Perhaps he doesn't want to be stridently poetical. The content's thoughtful enough, and the way he's sorted his concepts into the poems (which are typically a page long) is reasonable. The punchlines aren't satisfying enough for me though. I can't tell whether it's the persona or the poet who's puffing up the language but I think the poet can be blamed for the over-easy juxtaposings. I didn't care for the more overt philosophy pieces - "Self-and-Other", "She Tells Me What Counts", etc - and the ventriloquising (putting the philosophy into characters' mouths) doesn't help much. Here are some extracts illustrating the affected language and endings that I wasn't keen on.

• 
  Not really goin' back over, are yuse? I've been,
  coupla years I was over there. No, stay here.
  Europe's screwed up, en'it.
  

  The end of "Township Historian" - we see the local historian's other side all too clearly.

• 
  and the wind keens
  in beached dinghies' shrouds
  

  The end of "A Lake's Progress" - over-larded imagery

• May leafage as I cross from the Serpentine, and restored glintings of the Albert Memorial - kitsch space-rocket primed for blast-off (some of us wish it would)

  The start of "Art Found wanting" - I can't identify whose is the tone, nor do I understand the line-breaks.

• As I revive in fact and in mind the affective mood and the pretty-near hubristic avidity with which I once plunged into and sought to engross the amassed registration of civilized time at the for me, up from slumbrous Sussex, breath- taking British Museum

  From "Tricks of Time" - I don't get the diction. Is it the poet's or the persona's?

• I ease from the bed, defrock a window, and sky widens above the frost, crossed by an arrow of unquiet geese which forsake the river's leaden ice

  The end of "How" - poetical to no purpose.

• His watch wants him back at the office

  From "Life Slips By" - poetical. Odd line-break.

In the blurb Tony Grist writes "Don't think it comes easy, this throwaway ease of poetic manner. It takes more work, more honesty, more confidence than the aureate boom-booming that is more readily recognisable as poetry". But I rather like a confident boom, or at least an echo of one. And I think this book's poetry is too often gratuitously mannered.