Hypothetical May Morning

Michael Glovers writes a poetry whose surface can be lightsome and almost casually if not beguilingly playful and direct. But the playfulness can be a deception. Laughter dries on the tongue. There is often a terrible uncertainty about the speaking voice and a darkness about the themes the poems are exploring. The darkness of betrayal. The darkness of death. The darkness of never quite knowing where one stands. In short the sands are forever shifting.This eighth collection his first in five years draws on a variety of themes and situations. It drifts on a boat in Canada. It constructs a quinoa cake from mere words and phrases. It scrutinises the films of the great improvisatory director John Cassavetes. It even picks apart the multifarious meanings of the word book itself. The influences are as generously widespread as the poems themselves from Jorge Luis Borges to Archy and Mehitabel from the lyrics of Edmund Spenser to the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning.In the past Michael Glovers poetry collections have largely consisted of single poems each one self-sufficient. This volume by contrast is organised into several sequences. The Quinoa Cake Recipe emerges from and is a response to long summer stays in Canada. Notes to Harris is a series of short poems in which one North American friend addresses another with a wry casualness. Under the Influence a homage to Cassavetes is spoken by a male character from a typical Cassavetes film wayward and anguished: I am a raging bull of a man. I pulverise everything I look at. In short this is the widest-ranging and most accomplished collection that Michael Glover has ever written.