The best poems in Edwards’s collection do, nevertheless, generally resist such temptations. The book is divided into four parts. The first, ‘American Letters’, addresses the contemporary United States in ways that sometimes recall John Kinsella’s America or Glow (2006). Edwards is less scathing than Kinsella in his portrait. The poet remains strongly aware of the problematic nature of claims to ‘originality’, and the second part of the collection makes this manifest with retellings of Shakespeare, ekphrastic poems detailing works by Botticelli and Delacroix and, as Edwards has done so ably in previous work, poems addressing film, in particular Brando and the violent death of Pasolini (‘Death does not always come with splendour – / it can be suburban awful and cruel, an ironic jest / without a script’). Edwards’s range of references is vast. The third part of the collection, ‘Homage to Eliot’, recasts The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’ in a post-9/11 world. The fourth, ‘Travel and Returns’, includes the title poems of the book, a suite that strongly evokes the love poems of Donne.

Throughout, Edwards shows his great strength in portraits of the big stuff: love, landscape, death and war, such as in ‘The General’, a poem made strong with particulars (‘barefoot soldiers, the bleak plains, jungles of the Orinoco, the diseases // and his order to eat horses for fear the soldiers would eat each other’). Such fine poems achieve moments of high lyricism and leave theories of language to fight their battles on other fronts.

The metaphoric possibilities of couchgrass – for language, ideas, feminism, transgression – have ample room to flourish in Hecq’s short collection. A number of early poems posit a hostile ‘I’ addressing a (male) ‘you’, and in ‘Seven Deadly Things’ the narrator/couchgrass tangles with and ultimately colonises the latter’s canonical book/domain:

Original sin, says your book, is sexed
with pride: like couchgrass, it propagates
in your backyard. So you hoe and hack
…
But I too, read books, the roots of weeds
& the blade of your spade. It is too late:
see how I criss-cross that page in your text.

Like Edwards, Hecq sometimes draws on classical works. As well as the Bible, she addresses Shakespeare and, in ‘The Ferrywoman’, rewrites Greek myth (with, perhaps, a nod to Plath): ‘She now takes her own blood in her boat / … breaks / the myth / of the Styx / … see the children / rising up.’

‘The Ultimate Sound Machine’, similarly, links those old bedfellows sex and death, while a number of poems halfway through the collection also use the eye – in particular, the experience of laser eye surgery – as metaphor: for space, for the gaze that finds or overlooks, and for the diminishing of the individual, whether it is the unintended ‘sex change’ one might be allocated on a form in a doctor’s surgery (‘Laser Sharp’) or the reductive ‘full stop at the back of a glance’ (‘The Eye of Time’).

The couchgrass metaphor, its roots and runners, is so easily propagated that occasional weeding might have proven beneficial, but poignant imagery is not hard to find in this slender collection. Two poems stand out: the gentle dissection of a relationship in ‘The Offering’, in which ‘your hands part / one orange into segments – how the heart / falls apart like many petals’; and ‘Frost’, with its espaliered pear tree ‘with fists / full of shredded letters / from the underground’. Like the pear’s ‘jagged little notes / … composed / in the dark’, these poems are beautifully realised.