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I’m tempted to say that Chris Greenhalgh’s poems build on very little, and from the point of view of them dealing with encounters and incidents in detail that could well be true. For Greenhalgh the real world may be that of his imagination rather than one encountered on the streets. I don’t say this in a derogatory way, because his imaginative world is mostly an interesting one:

Hardly had I stepped off the plane onto a
                                                metal staircase
and inhaled the hot brume of a humid night -
scarcely had I entered the nightclub where
fluorescent light fell like tickertape across the
                                                               bar,

than I was sitting with you at the pool in the
                                               Gezirah Club,
stirring an iced drink with my finger,
dangling my legs in the water
and watching shadows mutate on the tiles.

     Of course, it’s likely that the poems do derive from real events (it’s easy to see the reality in the excerpt I’ve used) but my point is that they are then at liberty to go where they want as opposed to following a literal line of development. The only snag with this sort of writing is that the poet’s imagination has to be constantly fertile, picking up the possibilities in the slightest happening or observation and taking them to the point where a new world is created. Greenhalgh manages this most of the time, but sometimes the effort defeats him and he retreats into a cleverness which is a cover for having little to say. And occasionally the poems lapse into the obvious. One called ‘The Encounter’ imagines a disturbing relationship in a railway carriage. It moves to the physical:

My mouth sought the hotness of her throat.
Her head fell languidly upon my shoulder.
Her hands slipped from her lap.

But the narrator notices “the cold of her cheek, the limpness of her leg,/ the absence of her breath against my neck,” and the poem ends lamely, “Abruptly, I realized: she was dead.” It’s a conclusion almost obvious from the start, and though a good writer might have made an entertaining ghost story out of the situation it just doesn’t work as a poem.

     Still, quite a few of Greenhalgh’s poems impressed with their wit and energy and I was never bored when reading his book.