These selected poems have some features in common. Perhaps immediately obvious is their occasional use of the two-line stanza. This form gives the poems a uniformity of appearance yet it is put to different use in each. ‘Days’ utilises the couplet’s ability to create comparison. Two seemingly disparate images side by side in a repeating process. Since these images and events, which cover the historical, social and personal, are all given in the present tense, the effect is to condense time, to remove from it a linear progression. ‘Coming Thunder’, a loose sonnet, plays on this form’s inherent capacity to create and emphasise the notion of coupling. Its effect is visual as well as symbolic. In ‘The Norseman’s First Summer’, a poem which mixes plain English and fragmentary Old Norse, the form is used to control the poem’s pace, something crucial when two languages are in balance. And lastly in Labour, a poem exhaustively taxonomical, the form shapes the poem into a kind of ladder, each stanza break aiding the reader’s descent as well as their re-ascent after the poem’s final couplet.

In other works, such as ‘Coffee Morning’ and ‘from Lasts’, form is less fixed. ‘Coffee Morning’ tumbles from its initial conversational beginning, getting curt and sudden by the close. ‘from Lasts’, being an extract from a longer work, has a narrative drive, so follows the nature of that narrative. In ‘Odessa’, the first section of the poem, the narrative voice uses stanzas and stanza changes to progress, invert or encase individual thoughts and moments. Whereas later in the poem, in ‘Vicissitude’, each stanza exists to present complete or incomplete acts, a kind of poetical to-do list.

Thematically these nine poems are a somewhat broad nonagon held together by common concerns such as time, image and speech. There is a certain consideration for history as well as for the contemporary; with how things are said as well as how things are seen. Yet, perhaps most significantly, they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such.