Olivia Cole reviews: A Shorter Life by Alan Jenkins

A Shorter Life, Alan Jenkins' fifth collection and his first since 2000, finds him as "rudderless" as in his much admired, elegiac volume, The Drift. "Too late, all the dead in the river are my friends" - poems about lost friends and lovers, and the poet's late mother, movingly people this new volume with the characters that even the most cack-handed "life" writer would pick out as significant.

Sometimes brutal, sometimes comic and consistently arresting, the chapters offered deploy a harsh aesthetic regret - at misjudgements and mistakes, "the different women differently let down,/the rewind of your life you see before you drown -". Over all this is the shadowy question of whether his own go at life justifies the luck in not dying - like friends - far ahead of his time. "Cousins" finds the poet at home in the garden, a warm twilit moment, his mother calling him back from the morbid guilt that wonders uneasily at "the rewards of not dying young". The writer's life is pitted against the solid colour and domesticity of his parents' lives and is constantly shown as a force of disruption, carelessness, misery. "Galatea" sees the speaker cursed by a lover, casting him off, in his little boat, "in your little craft of wood,/Your little craft of words."

The poems about childhood, full of warmth and affection, for all the sickly queasiness of adult loss, paint a far happier scene than each of the unfinished conversations of "yet another almost-love affair". It is these poems that are the collection's most troubled and troubling poems - unresolved, bereft and burnished with facts which though the poet might wish to change, he does not balk from revealing, however wretched the details being dragged into the light. An unanswerable frankness proves the best tone for questions for which there are no answers, as in "As if",

The scents of cedar, maple and pitch-pine
through the open window brought her back,
I spun the car off the US 101, the slightly curved spine
between Hopland and Cloverdale, no turning back
and climbed out and started clawing at the earth
with my bare hands, as if...

However colloquial or crude, there's a contained, often almost painfully uncluttered lucidness - a frankness that always seems to find its honest, loving voice far too late: "And once she said, out of the blue/if we couldn't talk, if all we could share/was time, there wasn't any point in going on" (Heritage).

A love life, though, is only a part of a life and only a half-baked "life writer" might seek to suggest otherwise. Conscience-troubled remembrances of "almost love affairs" might make for coruscating "almost love" poems but an "almost" life divorced from living is not the story told by the humanity of so many of A Shorter Life's elegies and memories, whether about family or friends.

The poems about Jenkins's mother are difficult to read - the same disinclination to edit that gives the recollections of past lovers their frankness and immediacy, makes for an almost unbearably raw sequence of elegies. Similarly, the powerful (and aptly unembellished) "Rotisserie (The Wait)" and "(The Return)", about the late Ian Hamilton, are not so much elegies as flinching evocations of a state of grief: "These nights, I have to keep going back/To meet you, though it's still only me there"... Stood up by circumstance beyond anyone's control, he cannot stand the thought of his friend "prevented... /From joining me, from getting up and going,/To the phone, out to the tall night, anywhere." The poem's second part, ("The Return"), is a dream of the same city, the same table, the same horribly lit restaurant all too believable a stage set, empty of "you" to light it up, "feign an interest in the menu, fail to choose/And blind our waitress with a smile, a show of shrugs."

While Jenkins knows how and when to send up his world (see the definitive from A Shorter Literary Life: "in the taxi back to my hotel... 'Do you like Neruda?' 'Who doesn't?' (Do I hell.)"), so too can he explain the appeal, never with more uncompromising equipoise than in "Ex-Poet." Writer lovers learn how "life can break free of loneliness and fear/To be this richer, riskier thing, like theirs/Who searched for the beautiful and true..."

What's worth more - their love or their receptiveness to visions? Or can the two be un-teased? "Beauty", demythologised, in one of the collection's loveliest and wisest lines, turns out to be "how all things ache/To be expressed)". It's a house of cards of a poem that, like A Shorter Life as a whole, won't quite collapse either in favour of its hopefulness or its grim, emphatic last words: "He loved then, light that burned his northern eyes... what was made/And made well, no-one could unmake./The girl's long gone. What he wrote were lies." A "richer riskier thing" turns out to be a description as apt for the poetry written and the kinds of love that last, as for the lives that might have been.

A Shorter Life (Chatto & Windus), 64pp, £9.00

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.