Each phrase needs a moment of thought before it reveals its meaning. You could go through and expand the lines into a paragraph of prose — pointing out, for instance, that a pox of the mind conjures up the possibility of a simple human mistake causing terrible disaster — but you would lose the power of expression. There are other moments of bleakness in Taller When Prone. However, Murray's work comes back to a delight in rediscovery and redescription. A crocodile becomes "This police car with a checkered seam/of blue and white teeth along its side." Dew is "The unfocussed wet hover of dawn." Belly-dancers are "unaccusingly bizarre". A military parade: "arm-geometry/in the shouting-yards". Individual instances are amusing; but the instances add up to a significant project based on the conviction that nothing is too small to make a poem. 

Murray is increasingly worried by the barriers between the individual and the world — there are two poems about blindness — and by those we ourselves put up. Beside a motorway, "plastic shrub-guards grow bushes/to screen the real bush,/to hide the old towns/behind sound-walls and green". Green what? No, just green, the awful blankness of motorway design. Again, there is the distraction of "a mirrorball that spins celebrities/in patter and tiny music". The word-choices open up several implications: the hint of political deception in "spins", the word "patter" uniting the idea of a sales pitch with that of meaningless talk. "Tiny music" suggests the cuteness and inconsequentiality of pop, but also prepares the image of "earplugged sitters", who "wear the look of deserted towns". 

Taller When Prone ranges widely over family history, nature poetry both urban and rural, technology, and the possible renaming of Heathrow Airport (you will have to buy the book to discover Murray's advice to "the jarl of London,/white-polled Boris"). Inevitably, this slim village stands in the shadow of the 600-page Collected, but the virtues of Murray's work, its linguistic intricacy, originality of thought, and sheer entertainment value, are all here. He is less trenchantly opinionated than before, though by the standards of most poetry collections this one is pretty combative. One weakness of Taller When Prone is its over-fondness for the merely anecdotal. Since Murray draws to great effect on the language and rhythms of ordinary speech, it is natural that he likes spinning a yarn about, say, being mistaken for a celebrity chef. Once you have heard the anecdote, you don't need it again. But the strength of Murray's poems is that, for many readings after the first, you can carry on finding new things to enjoy.