Jacob Polley makes an impressive debut in The Brink. His poems are the work of a watchful eye and a nimble imagination. They lead the reader out into a world of boyish adventure.

They take you “to the fishmonger’s for a cod’s head”, for instance, and then “down to the harbour’s edge/ where the water takes deep breaths” to “tie it to a fishing line and lower away”, the “catgut biting your hand”. Later you draw it up and discover that, “Struggling under the weight of their shells/ in the air, the crabs hang —/ legs like picklocks, mechanical claws”. You “keep them in a bucket on the quay/ till the end of the day/ then tip them out, count them/ and kick them back into the sea”.

Or they lead you away to where the stream runs “out from behind houses into farmland”. Rust bleeds “from dumped washing tubs and pram wheels”, and “bicycle spokes and ragged tins/ slit the balls of your feet to the bone”. The water smells “of pennies sweating in a fist” and tastes “sharp as smashed glass”. And you mud-pie the cows who wobble “shy at the water’s edge”, or, finding a door in a field, you “shunt it into the stream,/ then follow it with branches, poking it sideways,/ hoping it wouldn’t wedge between banks”.

Polley’s vision is as fresh as a splash of cold water. His descriptions sparkle. Sheep in the snow are “dreadlocked with frost”, gulls “fall about laughing”, the morning “breaks like an egg” and the night air can drop everything “to pick up your scent/ in still fields”.

Perhaps Polley learnt to write with this clarity when, as poet-in-residence for a local Carlisle newspaper, he was required, over a period of three months, to produce a daily poem. He had to make sure that his work was accessible.

But don’t think this means simple. The sense of spontaneity is deceptive. Reading these poems is a bit like staring at something very hard for a long time. What at first looked mundane starts to seem almost magical. It is this moment of transformation that Polley so skilfully captures. He sees the possibilities that lie beyond the ordinary. They gleam in his poems like wet pebbles in the water. You can’t pick them out. They would dry and go dull.

It is this subtlety that marks Polley out as a poet to watch — especially when his works have a sad or sinister edge.

Snow

It survives in quiet places

like a rare species

whose habitat is silence

and closed roads. It upholsters

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