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This is Roberts’ second collection. It includes two sequences written to be set to music by the Scottish composer James MacMillan on which, having a musical dimension, I’m not qualified to comment. Like MacMillan, Roberts is a Christian, though not (I believe) a Catholic, and seeks to render this perspective in much of his verse - the spiritual residing, however fragmentedly, in human experience.

I was struck by Sun-dogs, a powerful piece of myth-making that makes the publishers’ comparison with Geoffery Hill not implausible. There is a fine poem on global warming, North moving South, in which vast climatic change is finally seen as positive, allowing olive groves and vineyards (“black stones on plates, red wine in glasses”) in erstwhile cold places. I enjoyed the wit of Mapping the Genome, where intellectual abstractions are undercut by the urgency of desire, as also Quails, a wry meditation on the lowly bird, and The Shortest Day with its description of the poet dancing with his baby in winter sunlight.

Most of Roberts’ poems, however, are literally portentous. He takes an incident from daily life and connects it with some Biblical or historical event. The intention is to create spiritual ‘meaning’, but the results are overblown and sometimes ludicrous. In Swarms, swarms of flies and wasps are related to the plagues of Egypt. In Salt, the local council’s salting of the streets after snowfall is compared to the ancient custom of salting a vanquished city, ending in sonorous but meaningless rhetorical questions: “Unaware of any battle / how can we know who defeated us?”

In Spent, the post-coital couple are suddenly compared, without irony or comment, to sacrificial peat-bog corpses. In Sailboarders, the sailboarders are compared to Jacob wrestling an angel and their sails to giant butterflies, ending with a daft non-sequitur:

Beyond the chrysalis, they only live one summer,
Such is their speed, their coruscating colour.

Elsewhere On Dyeing relies crashingly on the dyeing/dying pun (“Once we knew the cost of dyeing”) and there is a strongly apocalyptic streak in poems like Divers (‘The émigrés have gone back to the sea forever”), Cat’s Eye and A Calico Coat where a mythical figure, untouched by modern technology, strides on electric power cables across the world.

I am reminded of Orwell’s comment about Graham Greene in his most overtly Catholic phase, that this kind of posturing probably covers a weakening of belief, “for when people really believed in Hell, they were not so fond of striking graceful attitudes on its brink”. The discovery of the spiritual in the quotidian certainly takes more commitment than Roberts has yet shown.