The Good Neighbour works among oppositions: between neighbour and stranger, self and 'other' (including the non-human other), home and abroad, the known and the unknown. It is not surprising that the poetry becomes most exciting when these categories are questioned, breached, confused; when they show us that the 'soul' can be traced in its coming-to-being in the perceptual world; that other countries and languages, people, can be understood within their strangeness and complexity; that the human can merge with the non-human. Or when a list of street names - 'James Street, John Street, Burnside, Tollbooth Wynd' - causes us to double-take as we see the author wittily writing himself into the fabric of the world.

Sean O'Brien has written that 'Geoffrey Hill is an informing but not deafening presence' in Burnside's work, and a number of the poems here seem to take Hill's work (in particular the poems collected in 1996's Canaan) as a technical precedent. This shows itself not just in Burnside's titles - 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica', 'Annunciation with a Garland of Self-Heal', 'De Anima' (cf. Hill's 'De Anima', in Canaan), but also in the use, predominant in the first half of this book, of a broken-backed or two-part verse line, often tending towards or toying with the pentameter. Burnside plies this to his own purposes with considerable deftness at times. Elsewhere the Jorie Graham of 'Notes on the Reality of the Self' or The End of Beauty seems like a forebear, although Burnside's version of the philosophical poem is slower-moving, quieter, more British.

I say 'British' but perhaps I should say 'English', meaning the subject that people study in schools and universities. For these poems are very 'lit'. The first half of the book (subtitle: 'Here') has two epigraphs, the eight lines from Frost which supply the title, and ten from Wallace Stevens; while the second half (you guessed it: 'There') has another two: a not-too-difficult bit of Baudrillard ('Il n'y a pas de destin individuel') and some Bukowski. In between we get epigraphs from Keats, Thoreau; subtitles like 'Matthew 19-22' , 'after Aristotle'. There's something off-key in all this. It's all very well for poetry, if it wants to, to be learned, referential, allusive, whatever, but some of the learning here seems a little ersatz, sophomoric: the epigraphs are somehow too famous, too obvious, too literary. The book would be damaged not at all if they were removed.

And there's an odd sense in which none of the poems here is distinct from any other; by the time you've got two-thirds of the way through one, the emphasis has already shifted to the next. Continuous textualising. You could take the size of this book (eighty-three close-set pages) as a mark of plenitude, of generosity, and there are certainly lots of exciting specifics: 'Tom Waits is singing Bernstein.'; 'teddybear chollas, cactus wrens, ocotillos, / devil's claw, bursage, road-runners, red-tailed hawks.' - content! But the poems might have achieved what they do in half the time. A good neighbour is discreet, tactful, apropos; a bad one doesn't realise when they're boring you.

Perhaps the book contains the terms of its own adverse criticism:

I think you're about to tell me
that story I've heard before
[.]

.when every thought

recalls a children's prayer

a complex wish

expressed too clearly

in too simple words

Cruel, perhaps, to read the book against itself like this; but the things that take the edge off some of these poems are things they seem aware of. The second poem, 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica', is a case in point. It starts off briskly - 'I know the names of almost / nothing'. But, after keeping this energy going for a while, rhythm and phrase fractured, charged by the corresponding estrangement of the body, it seems unable to avoid resolving itself into some blundering banality. So, the nurse who 'opened the wound / and made me whole again'. Or the exposed eye of a skinless anatomical diagram: 'a window into primal emptiness'. Some complexities suffer from being simplified to this level. You can almost hear friends and well-wishers crying from the margins, Don't do it, John!, as 'primal emptiness', 'made me whole', come from the pen. A phrase of Geoffrey Hill's: 'The necessary voice of the heckler'; but this self-editing, self-critical faculty (or, indeed, the editorial advice of someone else) seems to be absent, or ignored, in some of the poems here. 'Primal emptiness' bespeaks a pattern of entropy it's hard not to associate with the crudest sort of literary professionalism, endlessly 'evocative' on autopilot, running on empty.

A dust-jacket blurb calls Burnside 'a stunningly good writer'. But who exactly is being stunned? The sometime failings and frustrations of this skilful book show Burnside going too easy on himself; failing to let his language stun him; failing to live up to his skilfulness. If the caveats of this review seem overly finical, it is because The Good Neighbour - which contains some very fine poetry - sets itself high standards of precision and insight.

John Burnside, The Good Neighbour, Jonathan Cape, 2005. £9.00. 978-0224075-17-6

© Matthew Sperling, 2005

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.