Stephen Burt reviews Stolen Love Behaviour by John Stammers

We know that a talented 21st-century English poet (Paul Farley, say) can render the 21st-century city in quick, ironic, breezy sketches. And we know that an extraordinarily talented 21st-century London poet (let's call him, for convenience, Mark Ford) can pursue the opacities of modern sociolects along with the bafflements of adult life. Can the same 21st-century poet do both? In cityscapes, domestic interiors, and briskly ironized variations on inherited language-games, John Stammers' second collection tries, and largely succeeds. His less ambitious poems capture moments in (or after) failed romance (less often, successful ones), or days spent in alien urban sites: the more ambitious works explore interiorities, wishes, hypotheticals, "director's cuts of the lives we've never led,/ unreleased and maiden from the archives."

‘I was born to be cold in a chill place,’ Stammers writes; ‘I've been caught in the company of uncool friends.’ If his poems share a mood we might call that mood retrospect, reasonable bitterness, a tightly-controlled esprit d'escalier:

Everything must settle, she had said,
everything must find its place: her, me, him,
the dust thrown up on the mirror,
the tail-lights heading off in the opposite direction.

Yet Stammers does not dwell only on one man's past: instead he comes off as an extroverted, slightly cynical listener, hyperaware not so much of his own language as of the language recently used around him. He is one of those poets who has to (ought to) work towards lyricism and contact, to struggle free of the blankets of newspaper verbiage, conversation, cliche, and who sometimes prefers to make art from those blankets instead. If contemporary corporate-speak and journalese make all too easy targets, Stammers has certainly learned how to hit them: ‘O give me a home that doesn't look like amorphous foam,/ I feel like singing at my desk, but decorum forbids.’

Stammers' cityscapes reveal layer after layer of information, evidence that many people have been there before; even his pristine countrysides (as in ‘The Varieties of Impression: Sunrise, Massachusetts’) bear his knowledge of previous consciousness: ‘You can't fall into the same sea twice.’ He compares his real, understated, and complicated London to a kind of dreamt video America, where a ‘jukebox sings dobro and Hank’ (that is, Hank Williams, Sr.), ‘and an outfit called the Tuscaloosa Boys.’ (It's a nice America to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.)

At his most flip or casual, as in ‘There’, Stammers can sound insincere, and macho to boot. Yet he follows that bad poem about a failing romance with a beautifully embittered, far more careful, poem about a romance that has already failed: in ‘Rosegarden’, ‘the defunct telephone is hollow as a bowl,’ and ‘the blunt daylight murders the thought’ of ‘one last charming lark,’ puts paid to ‘the idea that we could ever be anything/ other than someone we once knew/ in horticulture.’ (As Empson never quite said, it is the horticulture that endures.)

‘I wish my life were more coherent,’ Stammers writes in ‘Nom de Guerre’: there ‘The pavements are sweating a sort of grey gunge./ I have lost my ability to imagine winter.’ Such lines envy previous generations of poets maudits (among them Baudelaire, whom Stammers translates): those earlier (and un-English) moderns experienced far more pain than Stammers has, but found clearer, more dramatic stories in their own lives.

By contrast, Stammers casts himself as a literary latecomer, a ghostly, witty commentator, whether at his own breakups or at other people's epiphanies: ‘John Keats Walks Home Following a Night Spent Reading Homer with Cowden Clarke’ makes the poet an enticing eavesdropper on a force and a mind greater than our own, rising from contemporary involutions (‘as mercury/ integrates to a constant self-fascination’) to anticipate Keats' ‘visions born to survive.’

Stammers seems to agree with Rimbaud that one must be absolutely modern. What interests me most in him, though, are not his journalistic efforts, the ways he has of depicting Life Right Now (‘Two Japanese girls at Bank Station provide an instance/ of ultra-black’), as observant as those efforts can get; rather, I'm taken with his feel for low-key, late-coming emotions, for slight and bitter regret, for fascinations that barely rise to desire, for the beige or eggshell edges of sadness and joy and near-frustrations that make up much of our lives, but too little of our serious verse.

Stammers' long and information-dense lines, thick with fine-tuned emotion and cityscape detail, place him among older poets (all men, for some reason) whose repertoires include travel poetry and speculative linguistic investigation, among them John Tranter in Australia and August Kleinzahler in the United States. (Ford might belong here too.) Conversant with great swathes of prior writing, but uninterested in any One Great Tradition, and fascinated by all the contemporary language they can collect, these writers tend to sound both jaded and friendly, suave and unsure, arriving near the end of something big.

All those poets often seem to ask: what can our poise, intellect, and ever-expanding range of reference do to bring us wisdom, happiness, or better art? Can it do anything? Their lesser poems seem too purely occasional, too confident that, in the long run, they won't matter: the best - while still tentative, alertly belated - lay claim to a kind of secondary force, a Heisenbergian power to alter - at least in other observers' minds - whatever they observe.

Stolen Love Behaviour (Picador, £8.99)

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