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With his first three books Alan Jenkins could not and did not object to being seen as a very English kind of “confessional” poet. By the time his fourth collection, The Drift, came out in 2000 he was simultaneously wanting to lose that label and aware that it was hard for him to claim any other. He had assembled, again, a shortish collection of intensely personal poems about family, friends, love and sex, and felt embarrassed at not producing a “big, generous, outward-looking” book full of personae and voices quite different from his own.

He need not have worried too much then, and certainly not now. Confessional poetry often goes with self-regard and simplistic self-dramatisation, and nobody thought Jenkins was into any of that. The seam he was working in The Drift, and which he returns to in A Shorter Life, is not one of “confession” in the usual sense of raw, attention-seeking revelation, but of truthfulness. Commemorating a dead student friend in the former book, or contemplating The Love of Unknown Women in the latter, has involved extremely candid confrontations with intractable reality.

There is a price to pay for giving the truth in chapter and verse if the writer’s own existence is not especially colourful: the ordinary living and dying he describes must be made absorbing and important for the reader. Fortunately Jenkins can give lessons in how to handle vulnerable, risk-taking detail, and he easily discharges the debt. In his unsparing account of the illness and death of his mother nothing seems strained or out of place; the physical and emotional pain among furniture, photographs, clothes and (the title of one harrowing piece) the Effects is patently genuine. This bereavement stirs up vivid images of the vanished world of his forebears: father and grandfather making bolder attempts at sailing than the poet ever managed, the girl cousins (“sepia-tinted twins”) who died in some unexplained way, the two black sheep in India who “came / back home to smirch the family name / and piss the family fortune away”. The list expands to take in everyone for whom the poet is “their memory, and they must not altogether die”.

Death overshadows these poems, and the sex is equally haunting. Jenkins’s “fugue”, an elegy for poet friends Joseph Brodsky, Gavin Ewart and George MacBeth, lacks impact because it becomes a general meditation on mortality and fails to evoke its dedicatees. But two poems about the poet and critic Ian Hamilton capture exactly the man’s charismatic personality, and re-create the bewilderment and anguish involved in waiting in a restaurant “heavy with the stink of re-cooked fat” when he has died that day: “there’d never been a time you hadn’t come, / Grim faced, apologising. So I sat on, / Through the looks of waitresses who guessed / I’d been stood up, who wondered what had gone / So wrong for me I’d chosen this place . . .”.

Love may be better in the past — see The Classical Picnic — than in an ambivalent present where it’s all rueful nostalgia or explicit fantasy (“as if she could kick-start and ride / her massive Harley with me behind, could ride / and have me like that, while she gripped the steering”) or of down-to-earth disappointment. Heritage is a sourly funny poem about getting “versified revenge” after a dreadful day trip he spends hoping for sexual reward after enduring “the skyward-pointing spire . . . mile on mile of oncoming cars . . . panelled rooms . . . flushed, same-featured faces”. Naturally the affair comes to nothing.

Jenkins’s technique as a poet is resolutely formal. He develops his ideas, elaborately, in metrically regular, rhyming stanzas instead of just patting them into shape in groups of limp, free-verse lines in the currently accepted manner. Personal experience and reading mix and connect in these poems, and why not? The shorter life of the title quite reasonably becomes a “a shorter literary life” in a group of sardonic sonnets broadly about living with a literary job as you might “live with” a medical problem.

He successfully “co-opts” for his own purposes lines and longer passages from classical translations, and from French poets such as Mallarmé and Laforgue; some of those had a strong influence on his earlier work, now less obvious. More intriguingly, there are numerous deliberate citations of Philip Larkin’s poems that no Larkin junkie will miss. If you can’t beat him, Jenkins seems to be saying, be seen to join him. Another variant on the strategy of openness, the acknowledged borrowings and allusions help to explain the workings of a complex, referential style and add to the interest of a rich, disturbing and accomplished collection.

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