I never thought I'd buy a book called The Ninjas. I doubt if I ever will again but, in the meantime, the title does befit one of the themes of this collection, which draws a cartoon parallel world, a skewed displacement and conspiracy that both threatens and protects our own.
The poems overlap and link together in a way that makes it very much more a 'book' than a set of poems.
There are a number of groups of poems spread throughout the running order, not only the android, ninja and robot poems but some on wildlife, poems on paintings of siblings (by Sargent and Van Dyck) and then Last Summer, , Five Years Ago, , Last Spring, and This Morning, that somewhat unexpectedly ends the book not on its customary uneasy tone but with a rising feeling of fulfilment.
The Body in the Library is a fine piece of knowing angst and suspicion. We live precariously not very far from a hidden underworld of strange motives and supernatural forces, or is it just a child's baroque imagination.
In Sequel to The Witches,
They restore bassoons as a front for their larceny.
It is impressively imagined, clever, mildly disturbed and discomfiting because it might be more real than the indulgent fantasy it purports to be but where it fits on a scale between superficial trivia and profound is hard to say except that since it is undoubtedly postmodern, the question perhaps should not be put.
