Jim Burns, Ambit, May 2005

There are some lines in the first poem in this book that struck home and made me conscious of my own situation (getting older) and the way in which I often think I see someone from the past who, in fact, turns out to be another person:

Was it the blouse-and-skirt combination, the cut
Of the fair hair of the near-silhouette
Against the shining sea, that made me peer and stare?
I screwed up my eyes, unfocussed, to see less clear
And keep you a moment longer, hold you there.

And the poem goes on to say, "It has happened before." Kavanagh has a nice line in that sort of everyday occurrence which, if weighed up properly, actually says a lot about life. We want the person we imagined was there to come back, just as we want the old times back.
There are several poems like this, with references to growing old ("It seems, old fat cat, likely / that you will die before me") and there's also a religious sensibility running through them that gives the writing confidence. Kavanagh is good on nature, the seasons, country life:

Yesterday a gusting wind made float
Flat deer-shapes over the surface of green wheat,
today it is twitching shoals of silver fish
which at the field's sky-edge are white
gulls in flocks, they fly and never take off.

This is a quiet collection, rounded off by what the poet calls a few 'occassionals' (poems for old friends) and one or two wry comments on contemporary habits. Why, he wonders, do people constantly use phrase like 'To be fair' or 'To be perfectly honest'? (I plead guilty and promise to avoid them in future.) And the fashion for expressing emotions openly arouses his curiousity, though he is not dismissive of it and the poem hints that there have been times in his life when he wished he'd been a bit more evident in his affections. But, as he says, it was "Different then."