James Sheard - Dammtor

James Sheard, Dammtor, (Cape)

James Sheard's Catesby poem was just about the best thing in the Identity Parade anthology earlier this year (according to me), which might be a little bit like winning the League Cup, but, in the old cliche, you can only beat what's put in front of you.

Tim Liardet is the latest to get to express his doubts about that massed attack on posterity, in the latest PNR, while I'm now mostly fascinated by its biographical notes in which most of the poets are defined by the esoteric creative writing posts they hold in universities one's not quite sure one has heard of, as if they bestowed honour or meant something.

But I was looking forward to this book because I wasn't quite sure if Scattering Eva, his first, had provided anything I liked as much as the Catesby poem and there's nothing quite as disappointing as a one-hit wonder. There was no need to worry, although there are more poems that refer to the writing of poems that one would ideally like, one has to appreciate that someone who studied creative writing and now teaches it is likely to think like that and we mustn't think badly of them all the time.

I was also expecting a darker book, perhaps of more mitteleuropean angst, which despite James' genial cover photo, seems to lurk in much of his poetry, but although there is something sinister in the Sheard imagination, there's a lighter attitude here, partly the joy of being a father, also a more structured shape-making in the poems, and I think it's wittier than the blurb gives it credit for, which would sell you a bleak, unremitting book if it could.

The Strandperle Notebook is the most memorable piece, six and a half pages of sharply observed nostalgia for a place and its stored up history. Taking its tone and rhythms from Tony Harrison, it shows Sheard rather more metrical than the earlier book had allowed us to think, as well as adept at fitting captivating words to elusive measures,

Frumped-down Muttis hissing Susse

out from doorways, warm in comfy

coats and hats - their punters

mainly shy and just-past-school boys

needing someone who won't laugh.

After the Funeral is a fine, short poem that captures the sense of absence. The emptiness of Compound Country is out of season quietness but with the same threat latent in it that Sheard so regularly feels, in Taken, in Others, in Postcard from Famagusta and, you almost suspect, all the time.

The poems about the new-born son come at the end, straight after the funeral poem, and end on an undarkened note of thrill and Within Days, That Hour and Nathaniel at Newborough might have been a better place to stop than with The Last Poem, the point of which is lost on me. That Hour, again using a repeated stanza pattern throughout, is perhaps the best, apparently a request from Mrs. Sheard for a poem 'but not one of your usual ones', which one might suspect means more straight-forward and literal. He makes a great job of it. It's a fine thing to see a poet moving between metrical and free verse, rigorous formal patterns and less structured lines. It is a handicap not to be prepared to do so.

James Sheard is assured and accomplished and must be confident of a place among the most respected names in British poetry for years to come. Not too flashy, not too much of it and a sense of development from the debut book to the second, it all looks good from here.