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There’s an uneasiness running through the poems in this book, as if Paul Mills is never quite sure where he wants to be or, perhaps, what he wants to be. Quite a few of the poems are set in California, where Mills spent some time in the 1980s, and they suggest that he went there with his family in search of new ideas and responses:

Escaped from England,
driving miles to the far side of the mountains,
to where California, South of Santa Cruz,
reaches the vast San Luis Dam
like a sea at Dinosaur Point.

And he adds, “All I wanted was us, and this - America,” as if those factors would provide the remedy for whatever basic problem he had. But the poem goes on to say that it was America, or the experience of it, that led to the break-up of his marriage. It also records his own disillusionment with American academic life:

What’s happened to adventure, discovery,
                                                   experiment?
The Beat Generation are quite baffled.
What’s happened to intelligent, adventurous,
                                                      beautiful
America? What’s happened?
        Why have they all gone and married the
                                                      English?
Is only their speech different?

     When Mills returned to this country he doesn’t seem to have been any happier. There are sad poems about his wife leaving and some half-hearted attempts to heal the rift, and one which refers wearily to “curriculum solvency,/ skill-oriented aims, learning outcomes,/ recruitment drives, value for money,” and other phrases which make me glad I’m not in academic work. And though Mills moves around the landscape he grew up in he can’t find any inspiration in it:

Even politics is a half-shadow,
content with moderate effulgence,
distances trying to hide the horror of suburbs.
Nothing sheers this island out of the blue.
What invigorates? What will make it new?

     I’ve probably given the impression that all the poems are in the same vein, with despondency at their core, but that isn’t true. Mills can write convincingly about people and places and his work is always readable. It’s just that I have a nagging suspicion that he needs to come to terms with some inner problem if he’s going to break out of a cycle of dissatisfaction.