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Destinations – Derrick Buttress; Shoestring Press, £7.50

The first half of this very readable book offers poems on a mixed bag of subjects, kicking off with Growing Pains, in which a young man in his “last day as a hooligan” embarks on a search for his first job. At the School Hall Dance and other poems chronicle the progress of the same (we assume) young man, and Josef tells the poignant tale of a wartime refugee boy from Vienna who “we factory boys” teased mercilessly for his love of classical music until he became “so distant we could not reach him”.

War surfaces again in the slightly surreal poem The Dictator’s Apple based on a 1935 snapshot of the “man with the comic moustache” peeling and then slicing up the fruit as if it were Europe; and again in the thoughtful poem Sarajevo, where the besieged inhabitants dream of a return to a time when “Friends will return,/ their carriages rolling/ over the ruts of history…”

Rain is a motif, appearing throughout the book: apocalyptically in Eschatology (where the end of the world is envisaged as “hot rain falling/ on a boiling sea”), in the section’s title poem Reading the Weather as a sign of hope, and in the fine poem simply called Rain, which - as in Edward Thomas’s poem of that name - effectively uses repetition of the word to convey its relentlessness.

The book’s second section is based on the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s account of his travels in South America in 1799-1804; this part of the book is best straight through and is wonderfully realised. The poet assumes von Humboldt’s voice effortlessly, revealing a deep love and wonder for the rarefied landscape, its animals, plants and people.

Although sometimes the language in this collection lapses into the predictable or wordy, at their best the poems have much of interest to say, and often surprise and delight. From The Chayma Indians:

   Their language has no numbers.
   How many stars are in the sky?
   The sky is stars, the stars are sky.
   How many times has it rained today?
   It rained it rained it rained.