When David Brooks’s last volume of poetry, Walking to Clear Point, was published in 2005, it carried particular weight and fascination as his first volume of poetry in twenty-two years. It had been preceded in 1983 by The Cold Front, which, for some of us, was an influential book of ‘deep image’ poetry carved out of fault-lines and flaws, figuring honed poems of darkness and light. Now, after only a two-year gap, Brooks’s new collection of poems, Urban Elegies, has been published by the Island Press co-operative.

The collection is divided into three distinct sections that nonetheless have much in common stylistically, texturally and thematically: ‘Living in the World’ is followed by ‘Urban Elegies’, finishing with ‘Three Early Poems’. As in Brooks’s other works, pieces here find their place in juxtaposition and in the context of other pieces. He is supremely patient in the execution of a work, even if, at times, under all the poise and control of his writing, there is a tension, a restlessness that wants to break the constraints of form. His poetry induces a pause – not hesitation and not meditation (much of The Cold Front still in him), but rather a sense of caution.