Selected poems 1996-2006 from The Rialto, Seam, etc.
I think I prefer the older poems. The newer ones seem to have format-variety for the sake of it. "Spinach" is a sestina, which struggles. "We do not touch" is a loose pantoum. "Part-timer" is in loosely rhyming couplets ("vowels/careful", "piss/yourselves"). At the other end of the formalist spectrum is p.65 where there's "We are sitting in the blue Passat estate/ but we will not buy it./ It stinks of dogs for one thing (Labradors,/ at a guess) and the spec is really poor./ Sure it's got windows, sunroof/ and a boot the size of Alaska/ but the miles are wrong side of 65/ and for a K that's bargepole territory".
Leaving and arriving are common themes, uniting in poems where the narrator arrives after something's left, leaving remnants (evocative, mysterious). "What they left behind" is the most obvious example.
I like "The boot", one of a number of poems where mysterious remnants are found. "Leonard Cohen is my barber" ends the kind of imagery I'd like to see more of - "like fog lifting from a harbour/ or a woman's back, her dress/ sliding with hurry to the floor".
I think I don't understand the effect he's hoping the poems will achieve. Reading "February" or "The difference" my reaction is "So?". "Pay" is a dramatic monologue oddly shaped into 4-lined stanzas. Why? I don't think it's much good. Laid as prose the quality would be clearer. "Hiding" is better, but the layout (this time 5-lined stanzas - for a change?) again makes me suspicious. "A jogger" and "The Lodgers" are examples of another class of his poems - the thinly disguised list.
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