Zinger / Alan Jude Moore

Zinger. I love the word. The informal tang of it. The meaning of it. The back cover provides two interpretations and I keep saying the word bearing both in mind. Here are some more words Moore likes to use: Rise. Window. Distance Escalator. Umbrellas. And here's an entire line: 'we are the secret notes in background music'. Of course poetry is all about the line, and rhythm and sound, and with this, his fourth collection, Alan Jude Moore serves up a veritable banquet.

This is a batch of poems on the move. Moore's writing does not remain on home, sure-footed ground; his language does not take place in the bog, or on the land. No. He has a much wider canvas upon which to draw. He takes us to parts of Europe, across Russia and, interestingly, pit-stops in America. I do not get the feeling, however, that he is doing this solely for want of richer territory or for a more colourful palette. Indeed, offerings such as the ambitiously expansive 'Pennsylvania Truckstop', the lengthy, multi-part 'Perexhod' and the incisively surreal 'Do Not Stand Alone Near the Steps of Metro Stations' not only serve to highlight Moore's poetic concern (a world bumbling from crisis to crisis) and observational sensibility (evocative, symbolic, urgent, resilient), but more potently, perhaps, provide ideal departure points for the far-reaching linguistics that provides much of the collection's pleasure.

Laden with shrewd, arresting images — 'washer women dip their fingers in the moon' ('One Evening at the Well'), 'trains move along the skyline' ('In the Small Red Hut a Newspaper Seller'), 'do not jump from the window of that little skyscraper; / they have laid the ground with pillows / and blood transfusions' ('Do Not Stand Alone ...') — along with its formal abandonment and typographic playfulness, this is a collection with a set of arms and legs that reaches high, far and wide, coercing the reader into seldom-visited places of the mind and imagination. I was simultaneously intrigued, captivated, and curious. Who is Che Burashka? What is Detsky Mir? Where exactly is Butovo and how many died there? And has a poet anywhere at any time used the term 'coughing up limbs'?

There is also an urban vibe to these poems: a rugged, industrial sensibility, that acknowledges the poison in the fumes but clings to the possibility that 'somewhere there is your love / lying in wait like an escalator' ('The Futurist'). Repeating lines become searing paeans for the innocent dead ('Krasnodar'), absurdist instruction from a thought-police society ('Do Not Stand Alone Near the Steps of Metro Stations') and emotive rally-call ('The Power Station Looms Over the Bay'). At various points it is a collection both challenging and accessible, rousing and yearning, with the poet always on-hand to proffer a timely zinger: 'we hear the fingerprints of millions dancing back to death across black Ukrainian fields'; or smuggle in a heartfelt question in an almost chummy, off-stage fashion: 'listen, how long can you go on?' ('Perexhod'). At times the poems can and do feel strange, somewhat elusive even, as we are hauled across remote landscapes bygone historical events. So comfortable, however, is the poet within his chosen hinterlands that it is language and its usage — surreal, hallucinatory, mantra-like — that rises up and lingers like a ghostly fog. It is a collection that will reward multiple readings.

Many are emblematic poems, at times reminiscent of the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the French symbolists that preceded him and the Russians they influenced; poems favouring dreams, visions and soaring imaginative leaps over more grounded representation. These are poems more concerned with generating mood than providing meaning. I can well imagine the effect of some of them off the page — at times they reach a pitch that is incantatory. I also liked that locales recur from poem to poem: the Singer Café, for example, in the playful 'Che Burashka' that crops up more poignantly in the titular poem, 'Zinger'. This is a welcome feature in poems that inhabit such off-the-beaten-track zones, the one throws light on the other, further lifting the entire canvas.

This is a collection that breathes new life, refreshes what and how a poem can be, and has certainly nudged this reviewer towards earlier work. If this is a poet you are encountering for the first time I urge you to do likewise.