But James Sheard is well fitted to the difficult role because he is an entirely different thing, much less flash, for a start, and gentler.
Gentler, I think, also than in his first two books which I remember as darker and grimmer than these poems. Those two books are here somewhere, I know they are, but I'm damned if I can find them which is an indictment of both my librarianship and level of preparation for poetry reviews. I'm sorry about that.
There is either a relationship sadly finished in these poems or I have developed a debility that makes me read sadly finished relationships into any poem I read. But this is one place you can still come where the text is regarded as primary and not as a cipher for biographical clues about the author whose life is actually none of our business. The title poem, well-chosen as such because it is the most impressive piece in the book, is possibly, if unintentionally, an objective correlative for that theme that one senses throughout.
It's like the sands where you once might have watched
a lover coming wet and lovely towards you - undisturbed now
and colonised by the shyest of creatures.
If it seems unreasonable to expect another Spem in Aluim from Thomas Tallis then it is equally unfair to think that James Sheard might have written a couple more poems like that one.
For love exists, and then is ruined, and then persists.
None of the other poems stretch quite so languidly, broodingly or with such accomplishment across the page. It justifies the book on its own and the whole review could be about it. But if that is going to define the book by making it memorable, there are other poems worthy of our attention.
Landings suggests the idea of being tethered, as it were, or untethered, and which feels right or desirable,
we wanted a land where we might fall together,
then fail to wake - or, at least, to sleep beyond
the nag of morning, dragging us to its terraces
and its coffee and tobacco, taken slow and strong;
North is one of several where the music is subtle and just as much the point of the poem as its ostensible meaning. I'm often happy enough with fine music and care less about interpreting meaning but James is just this side of John Burnside on any such scale.
Even in novels of a couple of hundred pages, one sometimes notices a particular word occur among the many so they are much more apparent in books of poems.
Late threatens to be a sensational poem and is like a blueprint for something that was almost a classic but didn't have the ambition to be so but there is 'shyly' again. They use computers for concordances these days, I'm sure, but it is preferable if the words creep up on you more telling than have an app to show you. There is an appreciation of reticence in these poems but not reticence itself. They are very confident poems, confident enough not to attempt machismo or show off, which is the confidence of maturity, big enough to achieve acceptance.
James Sheard had fallen below my radar before I found this book had appeared but he's returned changed, and in significant ways, maybe the better poet for it. It's not the first time in recent weeks that I've reflected that there may not be an Eliot, Auden, Larkin or Heaney among the poets currently at the height of their powers, I honestly couldn't say which poets the second decade of the C21st will eventually be remembered for but, credit where it's due, we are not short of fine poetry to enjoy as long as you know where to find it.