Caroline Bird’s shoe cupboard must be an absolute riot. If the shoes are not there, she invents them. The Hat-Stand Union is her fourth book and it is rare to find a book so copiously inventive and full of energy, particularly the kind of energy that benefits from live performance. The book is divided into three parts, the central part, ‘The Truth about Camelot’, a twelve-poem game that plays fast and loose with the Arthurian legend. I don’t see a huge difference between parts one (‘Mystery Tears’) and three (‘Sea Bed’) but they serve to frame the centre, which anywhere else would have assumed a greater prominence. The energy-popping is both exhilarating and exhausting. As Simon Armitage says on the back, ‘you don’t know if a bullet will come out of the barrel or a flag with the word BANG on it.’ That is quite true. The reader doesn’t always know whether they have been shot or not. There is little blood in any case, or maybe if there is, it is just a pool with the word BLOOD on it.

Some poems generate from a discernible centre or core. The very first poem, ‘Sealing Wax’, does so. The invention proceeds from a feeling about a relationship:

Sometimes I think of you,

my funny prodigy

and, like an ashtray on a Bible,

I pose here defeated...

The ashtray on the Bible suggests a good deal that will not be followed up but as an image of desolation it works hard and it works fast.We realise that the ‘lean, dark and handsome hat-stand’ that follows two lines later is a symptom of the same feeling, a substitute for a real person and by the end where the poem speculates about who is spreading vapour rub on the other person’s chest we know we have been down an unfamiliar route to a familiar condition. Many of the best poems in the collection, and there are many of them, work on this level: the sharp cut to the old nerve.

At other times things happen in no particular order through a sort of perpetuum mobile we watch simply because it is moving. The poem ‘2:19 to Whitstable’ is an example of this. The phrase ‘I’m leaving once...’ leads us through two solid pages. The device is not new in itself – I think of Christopher Smart (and indeed of poems I myself have written) – and know that the dynamic depends on an improvisational momentum in which the writer believes and which the reader is persuaded to believe. As a stand-up performance it must be dizzying. Individual lines are good. The rhythm – and so much depends on the rhythm – is convincing. You go along for the ride and then there you are in Whitstable. It’s a fast train moving at the same pace, flashing past regular lamp posts. It’s the poetic equivalent of strobe lighting. I have the same feeling about a number of the poems where surreal leaps are piled on surreal leaps. I love surrealism but I like it best when it’s about more than itself. ‘Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church’ is just what it says on the tin. But it’s a gift and a valuable one, in the same way that what Robert Graves called a poetic trance is a gift, indeed a necessary one. Any poetic voice is perceived as an angle to the world and Caroline Bird’s voice is precisely that. I am perfectly convinced by the angle. It’s just that I don’t want things all angle.