For All We Know, by Cieran Carson

This is the first Poetry Book Society Choice I've been sent. It's a collection of 70 poems, with each half of the book having the same sequence of 35 titles. Similar subjects, images and ideas recur throughout, with associations particularly edivent in adjacent poems or between corresponding pairs: it's no wonder there are frequent references to fugue.

And yet, there's a greater sense of discursiveness and incorporating new material than is typical in fugues. This is partly because of the verse form, long unrhymed couplets. It's also because the repeated subjects (violet, watches, Bach, Berlin and Dresden, The Troubles, speaking French, Hesse's beautiful novel The Glass Bead Game, Mont Blanc pens and second hand clothes) aren't similar enough to be inversions of or variations on each other, although they do work together to create a distinctive atmosphere. Here, the doubling is used not for sharpening focus, but opening up possibilities.

A particular challenge for which work very much as a whole, like this one, is to make the individual poems well formed in themselves. Whilst it's an elegantly structured collection, it's not particularly quoteable, because each part depends on the others for its effect. There are some particular pleasures with this approach: the playful reworking of one poem in its twin, for example. This is most obvious where the Edenic Apple Mac's drop-down menus are 'putting words into your mouth' and then the corresponding poem's description of eating an apple called a Discovery. The prominence of such structures and repetitions ensures that, unlike the famous description of Hamlet as ' a play made of quotes', this is definitely a poetry collection before it is a book of poems.