A child asks if people drown in the Thames. A favourite flower-print dress disappears. Loved ones die. Empties are dragged to the curb. Though rooted in the ordinary, Motion's poems are anything but.

In the masterful "Look" the poet forges connections among events that seem, at least on the surface, quite unrelated. First, his unborn twins swim "in mooning blue, / their dawdlers' legs / kicking through silence / enormously slowly, / while blotches beneath them / revolve like the earth/ which will bring them down to grief / or into their own." Next, his ageing mother lies in bed "as though any day now / she might lift into space / and never return / to breathe our air." Finally, the speaker awakens from a dream "that time / will last long enough / to let me die happy, / not yearning for more / like a man lost in space / might howl for the earth, / or a dog for the moon / with no reason at all." Here, four tentative futures powerfully converge in nothing less than a visceral tour de force.

Unpredictable, unsentimentally elegant, Motion has inherited all the rhythmic and narrative genius of Robert Frost. "I stamp both feet and disappear in a cloud," he announces in "Fresh Water." Lucky for us, he's speaking metaphorically. --Martha Silano