Feel Free is an ambiguous title. You could be taking an empty chair with Laird’s permission and helping yourself to his poems, or it might be an imperative on how to live your life. (The title proved so tempting that Zadie Smith, Laird’s wife, poached it for her recently published essay collection; they now find themselves in the engagingly absurd situation of having published two books under the same name, a form of literary marriage, you could say.)
Throughout this outstanding collection, there is the sense of an elsewhere, at once tantalisingly close and unreachable. The opening poem, Glitch, describes a fall and the unshakable sense that follows, “of being wanted somewhere else”. It recalls Emily Dickinson’s line: “Life is over there – Behind the shelf…” Yet Dickinson’s lonely oddity could not be more different from Laird’s family scene (described with subtle, self-disparaging wit in Fathers). In the title poem, he aspires to a “neutral buoyancy” and appreciates the “steady disruption” of a stream. But life does not do steady for long.
To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-In Desk at Newark – a comic mouthful of a title – is an apology, an act of extended empathy, at which Laird excels. He has been at the airport and, one gathers, been less than charming to Shonique in his need/desire to fly home fast (his mother dying). What he now considers is Shonique’s individual humanity (her manufactured name no obstacle): “I understand your relatives are dying also.” The poem has lift-off, no matter what happened to the aeroplane: “there’s time lifting everything in sight, / Shonique, pocketing orchids and mothers”.
What time pockets is the subject of other poems too. Silk Cut is perfect in its simplicity – about losing his mother and keeping his father company – the child’s hand was once burnt by the tip of his father’s cigarette. Now, “I have to stop my hand from taking his”. So much about his father is in that quiet last line – no need to labour anything. And there is a further stunning poem, The Folding – a domestic elegy that describes his children cutting paper snowflakes as his mother once taught him to do. There is nothing forced here – it reads like a gift, as if it had arrived with the snow he describes with such verve:
A snowflake catches
In her mother’s lashes when Katherine’s
Looking upwards through the branches
at the sky, at the unfolding of bright
wave on bright wave, coherent scrims
of quick scantlings looking to alight, alive,
and we hold out our hands until they are white.
Laird is formidably accomplished – his poems range from free verse to villanelle (further exploring freedom and limitation through form) – and is keenly aware that language is only as good or bad as people make it. Language can exist in bad faith, as his reference to the South American “disappeared” makes plain in The Good Son. In Grenfell, too, he shows up the fatuousness of survey speak (unwittingly risking trivialising his subject).
In the moving poem On Not Having Children, Laird singles out words that have the distinction of not reproducing themselves in rhyme: “and there are words that lack rhymes: silver; month;/ depth; false. It makes them immune to doggerel/ but also to the ballad form”. He has an ear for what language betrays and, in the beautiful Incantation, for its fidelities.
Several poems are one better than still lives – they function as animated lives (sample Watermelon Seed, which anatomises the “eviction by your fork” of “slabs of seeded red”). But the greatest joy of reading this unmissable collection is Laird’s peripheral vision as a poet: the deer seen from a suburban train; the unplanned signature on a windowsill in deep red dust; the many glimpses of elsewhere.
• Feel Free by Nick Laird is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Incantation
Because we time-travel into the future
at a blistering sixty minutes an hour,
I ask you to sit down and write me
one beautiful sentence I might carry
in my pocket on the journey when I go,
and in the window of the train unfold
O you were the best of all my days.
Never knowing if the thing is broken
or the door between us is still open,
you would like me to sit down and write
you one beautiful sentence you might
carry in your wallet when you leave,
and in the cab you take it out and read
Permit me voyage, love, into your hands.
Depending where one stands, each circle
back is a possible fall, a fail, a spiral,
and I would like you to take a few seconds
to write me out one beautiful sentence
to carry now across the night and ocean,
and held up at the gate I sit down and open
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
