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Stannard’s first collection by contrast will provide you with a lovely diversion from this cold, wet winter. The style is light, airy and seemingly effortless; the tone, gently ironic and at times perhaps whimsical.

     Set for the most part in northern Italy where Stannard lived for a time, the poems are populated with characters that seem to have stepped out of a Calvino short story - “the butcher, the baker,// the priest, the collaborator...” and though the quasi-narrative trajectory of the book is clearly autobiographical you have the sense of this world as a beautiful but fragile construction; Stannard’s creation of it as a kind of willed suspension of disbelief: “Although the city had many failings/ it had many exquisite bars/ but they only existed if you wished them/ and they were always in the secret places” (from ‘Combinations’).

     In this world, rituals are continually performed as attempts to imbue experience with meaning, to overcome an intangible but pervasive threat of dissolution, “Every morning you show me your breasts/ and then dissolve into the fog” (from ‘Lives’); offal is washed in oil for preservation to “pull us through” (‘Oil and Geese’); for Rina, an elderly woman who lived in Lombardy in ’43 and who remembers the war as “fog/ and a landscape of ghostly bicycles/ all ducking and weaving”, chicory and bidets form the basis of the routines which give her her sense of order and decorum; and back in England when there’s a crisis, “Walking is what the English do” (from ‘Aldeburgh’).

     Images of dissociation and disembodiment recur. Fogs, glass screens, cloth (behind which the world murmurs “like a beast in the night”), a jacket worn to the doctor’s, an old inherited coat - all come between the self and the experience. Verbs tend to be passive or have no subject: “For five years sitting against/ a tree next to the river/ with the sea over the mountains/ is not what really happened”; even fatherhood is experienced ostensibly as a passive state: “A small boy ran into the bedroom/ and announced that he was mine”. And in a poem of ultimate disembodiment, the poet comes upon his own corpse, “floating gently under the waves”. Typically, the portentousness of the moment is lightly and humorously undercut, “I wanted to wish it well/ but my words fell on dead ears” (from ‘The Corpse’).

     What I like best in the book though is the way Stannard can balance this irony with a childlike openness towards life which being “as quick as the pouring of tea”, he advises the reader in the words of one of his characters, to “run your hands/ over its swiftness”.