There was Fire in Vancouver, by Sinead Morrissey

There's a poem near the end of this collection where Sinead Morrissey describes watching a juggler:

He must have practiced for hours...
...To dance the seven painted skittles
Off his fingers like that.
He has the game whittled

To art. God knows what
Anachronism he took up before...

...He knows
How we anticipate failiure...

...We are nevertheless caught

By the weightlessness, the controlled
Mechanics of air...

...We are not as far out
From faith as we were.

This filletted precis of the poem could describe Morrissey's own work. Having been so utterly impressed by her reading in Belfast, I anxiously anticipated success. Nonetheless, in the sense of practiced performance, the sense of technical accomplishment to a modestly entertaining end and the sense of someone learning a traditional skill and exploring uses for it, this poem is true to the experience of reading the book as a whole.

There's an interesting essay by Hazlitt (called The Indian Juggler) that compares juggling with art, attempting to use one to clarify the boundaries of the other. Certainly, the moments of less original proficiency give a sense of very normal poetic material being shuffled around deftly.

This is not to say that there aren't fine poems in here: Amongst Communists, Awaiting Burial and My New Angels are all well turned. And there are fine lines in others: 'The trees' bold undoing / Is no serious grief, but an accomplishment of practice' in A Performance, for example. To Look Out Once From High Windows is also an interesting comment on Larkin's loss of creativity following the poems that make up his last collection, High Windows, although one that is a little neatly comfortable to feel true of that particular case.

Overall, the book is more reminiscent of Elizabeth Jennings' little gems, such as Delay, or as prompted on the cover, the strongly placed and humane observations of RS Thomas. But it feels that she is still searching for a poetic identity and trying on a range of subject matters. In this collection the result is rather slight, though it's evident that the skill is there. I haven't lost faith, but I look forward to seeing this skill being more convincingly employed in her other collections.