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But someone liked them – W.H. Petty; Overstep Books, £8.00

The challenge for the reader is to work out why most of the 46 poems in this collection won the main or a runner’s up prize in competition. In a short introduction and a brief essay at the end he admits he does not know. He also tells us he was once persuaded to be a judge and will not repeat the experience. Like Larkin, he shuns competitions where the named judge’s task is to sift only a small selection of the submissions. In this volume he’s thrown in a “few poems” to make up the weight, but he cleverly does not identify them. My task is to tell you what I think of a collection pre-wrapped in laurel leaves. As you might expect, I like some poems more than others, but the ones I do like are numerous and superb. I prefer poems which are the result of distilled experience and shimmer in bright sun, gleam in moonlight, or have magical phosphorescence in pitch darkness. These include On Bombay Station, Material, Now he lolls and Easy. What the best have in common is economy of words, a search for accuracy, sharply observed detail, the revelation of feelings with a decent restraint, a depth of field. They appear to be derived from a long life lived to the full. Some leave you searching for answers to enigmas. In Bus, a poem of four five-lined stanzas with a haunting coda of three lines, Petty’s qualities are epitomised. Here is a taste:

The bus tugged against the winds
of Northern Lincolnshire.
The four of us, the driver,
two passengers and I,
sat weighty.

Rain broke over the windows.
One traveller stared
across a stick. His fists were taut:
his long and vein-bright face
was tense.