The Casual Perfect, By Lavinia Greenlaw

There's magic in mere wisps on the page

'It's not the theme that interests me/ but the variation," announces Lavinia Greenlaw in her new collection of poetry, the first since 2007's The Importance of Music to Girls.

Such clues for the reader are thin on the ground. "One day I'll learn to listen/ to ... the agony in the irony," she goes on, but this is a collection that is long on the latter, short on the former.

There is some emotion to be gleaned from these cool, opaque poems. "Where does everyone go?" the poet demands fretfully in the poem "The End of Marriage", while across the page, another, "Dreams of Separation", draws a strict line between outside and inside: "The howling mansion./ The hyper-dimensional wood."

But at other times the poet is a bystander, as in "Saturday Night", where young girls dance while the boys, "All strop and tang", lurk. It's no one else's business: "You who pass by, pass by," the poem concludes.

"Essex Kiss" hymns the poet's home county with its "Chewing gum and whelks, a whiff/ of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit." Nicely earthy, it contrasts with the cerebral tone of much of this collection.

Many of the poems are mere wisps on the page, their effects so small that barely anything occurs. But when the reader senses that this restraint of expression really is restraining something, the effect is magical.

"Water for Tea", for instance, casually offers a Moon that is "a disc of satsuma powder-paint" and a memory: "It is ten years since,/ on the Tokyo metro, my train stopped for a minute/ at Water for Tea Station. A warrior rested at the spring ... To this day, I drink tea with him."