As we might guess from the striking Japanese woodcut of a monkey reaching for the moon on the cover of Kelly Grovier's first collection, these are poems of Sehnsucht, poems that end with soul or sky or moon or - at least five times - the stars. They are none the worse for that, and their Zen-like tranquillity is achieved through considerable technical rigour. Grovier is American-born, and he brings some of that natural ease with the bigger picture, a willingness to confront what the English tradition is more inclined to regard as ineffable, while keeping a sharp eye on the everyday details, which themselves offer a key - as when a wishbone propped in a kitchen window is "like a twig / in the palms of the infinite, dowsing / for our inscrutable blood".

Grovier frequently employs unrhymed tercets, a form particularly suited to the deft enjambment, witty shifts in meaning and ironic highlighting. He carries this off quite effortlessly, favouring the one-sentence poem, but not afraid of the odd rhymed lyric, occasionally deconstructing his own work for us ("Mincing Words"), or toying with aspects of punctuation or a phrase which has caught his ear, such as "Sweet Fanny Adams". Not all of these experiments come off - the alliterative "Midas" and the dubious humour of "Extraction", for instance; nor his curious neologisms: "Zenning", "cezanning", "prisming". He also over-uses the preposition "of" in some of the earlier pieces.

Yet in most respects this is a delightful collection, introducing a poet of real humility, who listens to his words and guides them into place. "Rain, Steam and Speed", for example, traces in fifteen lines Grovier's maturing responses to Turner's masterpiece, from boyhood's attention to "how its engine / emerged from fire coagulating // around the curve", through to the kind of subtleties a young man likes to boast about ("the hare in front - the machine / retreating to mirage behind it") to his present reaction, when his eyes "seem less and less instrumental than they were - my mind, like a canvas tilting - the air clumped with oil, still waiting to be squeezed".