The final poem of this superb collection, ‘The Darkness’, identifies a primal scene. The young protagonist is a nascent poet, watching over the embers of a desert fire in early morning, awaiting the breath of a Pentecostal wind to rekindle the flames. It is a parable which emblematises the difficult task of transformation that is central to poetry itself: the boy contends with ‘fragments / that will not alchemise to song / that yield not / to the metaphrast’.

Decades later, David Brooks returns to this scene in a companion poem, ‘A Place on Earth’: now the embers of the log contain all of civilisation and cultural history, in ‘a phoenix nest’, a perpetual zone of potential renewal. Behind both poems is the sensed presence of immanence, ‘that something / rustling in the undergrowth’, which is related to an awareness of ‘the still / point of his being’. The title of this selected volume directly recollects Rainer Maria Rilke’s description of precisely this recognition, in his essay ‘An Experience’, where he relates the sensation ‘that he had reached the other side of Nature’. This is the essential poetic experience which Brooks continually aspires towards, and sometimes locates.