Even in poems where there is a more intimate and familial Ken Boltonesque discussion and interaction with friends, where irony belongs to the conversation and occasion rather than the situation or conversation being ironised, the persona of these poems, the poet ‘David Brooks’, living his life the best he can, teeters on the edge of horror and collapse.

The poem ‘Sadness’ ironises the emotion, the state of ‘sadness’, through friends, alcohol, the familial, the safe – driving out sadness only to have it raise larger ontological questions. What excuse do we have to be unhappy, to feel sadness? Is it a necessary default setting? He finishes that poem with the lines:

my wife is happy
my daughter is happy
the fish in the pond
are darting about
under the little fountain
as if sadness were another country, much
too far away to bother with today

The casual tone and the almost flippant disregard turn the poem sharply. It means the opposite of what it says, its implication that the best kind of personal ‘rewards’ bring the largest emptiness, or ‘sadness’. leaves the reader hanging.

Earlier, I referred to a sense of caution because moments of beauty suggest a cost or a loss, even when there seems to be nothing specifically located. It is more to do with the pacing of lines, stanzas, the use of precipice, single words or very short lines leading into horizon-length lines that take us further than an edge: ‘Night / fills us with unassailable longing.’

Often a resigned yet self-ironising conversation, cut to the necessary, guides us. Brooks’s engagements with ‘evil’ turn on and through the observing self – certainty is relative. Death is often close at hand, but its trauma is elevated to a form of fatalism. When he invokes the ‘thingyness of things’, it is in a Ponge-spirit, a spirit of the myriad in the finite. The central section of the book, the eponymous ‘Urban Elegies’, does not exclude the ‘natural’ from the constructed, and indeed these poems are often tense textual manoeuvrings between the two. Brooks’s irony works in conjunction with an earnestness; out of the ridiculous, tendentious or humorous, he finds the invested moment, the resonating possibility.

There is an empathy with animals that simmers and intensifies through the poems, for example in a ‘Dog at Fifty’ and ‘Rat Theses’, from the same middle section. The opening section of the book, ‘Living in the World’, carries an almost perfectly balanced poem, in which the irony is genuine sadness and horror at the behaviour of humans towards other living things. After ‘four-wheel drives some like to call / “Balmain Bulldozers”’, we read:

The traffic is loud
and hard to listen through.
The delicate breaks
and fragile
skull-bones. The
tiny, intricate feet
under the
dark
rubber tyres
make sounds that
nobody can ever hear.

The use of the line-break, the precipice words, is typical, but the strength of this indictment is enhanced by the use of commas. Brooks is always a technician, even a formalist, at heart. He is also a poet of dichotomies and resolvable paradoxes – place is specific, even totemic – the persona’s having been there, especially with loved ones, makes it even more so. There’s a de-dramatised, familial tension between the aesthetic and actual, where the subjectivity of the persona, the lyrical self, undoes its own unities of perception through self-questioning and most often the simple act of questioning itself.

The poems in Urban Elegies encapsulate wonder and contained anger, irony and a sincerity that most often becomes unspeakable – in fact, becomes ‘pure image’. Brooks has always been an imagist at his core. There is a strong and conscious residue here of his earlier engagements with ‘deep image’ poetry, of the hyper-invested spiritual material of a poet such as Galway Kinnell. But Brooks has allowed the space of his poems to grow: they contain a relaxation now that makes the pain and sorrow resonate all the more. The anger that drives him to curse the poisoner of a garden, a deep hurt, resolves itself in incantation the form ironising his condemnation. Finishing thus: ‘Let them never understand such / fury, such sadness as this’, ‘The Curse’ is explosively angry, but its anaphoric deployment allows space for any fallen angel to be resurrected. Brooks has not learned to hate.

He is a master of subverting the reader, of letting himself in through our flaws, the most celebratory, the most ‘living’ poems often being the most residually disturbing. Though the poems seem straightforward, they are subtly innovative in their deployment of voice, subjectivity and observation of the natural and material world. There is also a conversation going on with all other poets, the key to which is his resistance to all forms of gatekeeping (try the cuttingly ironic ‘Barnyard Revelation Poem’).

Not everything the poems attempt is successful. They are strongest when being ‘strong’, and can occasionally become too easy, too casual, missing that haunting resonance you don’t expect. Occasionally, a poem moves between the two states unconvincingly. But the power of Brooks’s work can never be underestimated, and there is an important poetic project here amid the integrity of individual poems. The construction of the book is primary to Brooks, and each poem becomes part of the whole, speaking across and through the book. In this, he bends to his symbolist predecessors, especially early C.J. Brennan, but he is altogether outside of symbolism as well: his images are too specific, too located for this. It is the hybrid of sensibilities within the oeuvre that makes him a significant poet in these insights and elegies of transformation and epiphanies, ends and beginnings, curses and blessings.