Deceiving Wild Creatures - Jeremy Over (Carcanet, £9.95)

This slender collection (just over 60 pages with poems on them) has a wonderful cover. It is an old monochrome photograph of a man carrying an imitation ox. It would invite anybody into the book: it is a friendly wink, a jovial chuckle. And so you enter.
Deceiving Wild Creatures is going to work well for Jeremy Overites - people who know and like the poet's style. His garde is fairly avant, so you need to steer your canoe somewhat off mainstream. The first poem was not successful for me. It is an Epithalamium with a dedication - a worthy form - but I found it too off-beam to relate to and although I could see there was some jollity going on, I didn't feel part of it.
Nevertheless, I made it to 'Museum for Myself', in which I loved the final section, then 'A New Kind of Kiss' which I liked without knowing why (shades of Andrew Elliott). There were some poems I didn't 'get' and didn't feel I wanted to work at; others whose playfulness I savoured. There's a lot of fun going on in this book - even an element of music hall - and although it takes a while to get into it, the pay-off is there. I love the idea of the 'Comman Pitfall' which is found floating on a pond with 'a gleam in its eye' - and where that redoubtable creature took me.
One set of poems draws on Gilbert White and his Natural History. That's where I would recommend starting: there's enough coherence here, thematically, to get the feel of Over's style and to cope with the anarchy of a text like 'The exhibition of the fishes' while still feeling you're on the map.
I really like 'Birthday Haibun' and 'Poem beginning with a suggestions by Bengt Af Klintberg'. Though light, these are not poems written lightly. Jeremy Over is deeply preoccupied with language - its cadence, its music, its embedded jokes. In 'Badly Charred', he cheekily observes that 'To make art which doesn't sit on its ass in museum but which prompts a rediscovery of the world, like Eartha Kitt's Englishman, takes time.'
There is an element of rediscovery here: it is modest, quirky, often self-deprecating. You need to read quietly without preconception of what you think the poems should be doing. They are deceptive wee creatures and will surprise you.