The cover of John Boland's Brow Head features a version of Caspar David Friedrich's `From the Summit'. Where Friedrich's figure stands on a rocky outcrop overlooking a mass of fog and cloud, every inch the Alpine Nietzschean, Abbey Press's designer has substituted a bright blue sea and a grassy mound beneath his feet: a Zarathustra of the lowlands.
Given Boland's preference for the down-to-earth as against the gaudily high-flown, it isn't such a bad substitution. Brow Head is a book of guarded affections and affectionate disillusionment. Two poets obviously of great importance to Boland are Stevens and Larkin; the former's "Time will not relent" is used as an epigraph.
Boland would like to believe in art as a protest against this state of affairs, but can't help feeling that disappointment and failure are in fact the very things that art reveals. "Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know /Where youth and joy and wonder go", he asks in "Ideas of Order in a Room in Dublin".
The problem with this side of Brow Head is the number of poems that succumb to pre-emptory gestures of resignation, like snuffers clapped on a candle: "God is the Concept by Which We Measure Our Pain ", "The Palace of Wisdom" and "Drumard" with its dispirited confession of glibness.
Stating a predicament does not mean you have explored it, and "Drumard" sets up only the terms of an argument it never really engages with. Other poems such as "The Life of Reilly", "The Leinster Road" and "Lusisti Satis" perform rather mechanical acts of anamnesis, allowing themselves to forget the anti-nostalgic lesson of Larkin's `'I Remember I Remember". "The Homing Pigeon" by contrast succeeds through a witty appropriation of cliche for its feathered flight of fancy ("I am an embarrassment to my profession... / What I am doing is strictly for the birds").
The other poems which show Boland at his best are those in which he avoids obviousness. These include "The 62 Bus ", with its skilfully judged description of his mother's final bus journey (ending simply "She complained of a discomfiture"), "Safe Sex", "For Those Who Were Not There" and "Winter Kept Us Warm ", in which ashes as an image of winter are suddenly transformed to an image of protection when they are scattered on a garden path.
These poems span many years' work, but it is successes like these that lay the surest foundation for his books to come.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic