The novelist, editor and critic Derwent May is well known to readers of The Times for his "Nature Notes", which he has been writing for some 30 years. But he is also a superb poet and though his poems have appeared over the years in various magazines, Wondering about Many Women (Greenwich Exchange Ltd, £7.99) is his first collection. At first sight, this is the usual "slim" plaquette of exquisitely crafted verse. Don't be deceived: this is a masterful and deeply moving collection. In reading the poems, one has the felicitous sense of long experience consummately distilled. May is adept at many difficult forms — the sonnet, the quatrain, blank verse, the triolet and the ballad — but he handles these so deftly that we are less impressed by his command of the craft than by the justness of his expression. Take "The Ginger Cat":
The ginger cat on the curtained bed
Only purred,
Beside her, men cried, went mad, went blind
Or died.
But till long after the last train had gone past
She only, slightly, stirred.
Those strategic commas in the last line are the mark of a master; this is turbulence, and tragedy, inferred from the demeanour of a lounging cat, and just as delicately suggested. May's collection opens with three love poems; all turn on recollection. And indeed, recollection, sometimes poignant, at other times serene, informs all the poems. But there is something distinctly sharp-edged, a razoring demarcation, in May's finest poems: he anticipates recollection even as he struggles with the past. This chameleonic perspective — one eye cocked on the past, the other tilted towards an imagined future — is especially moving in his poems on children. Whether on an outing, as in "The Walk" or at a performance, as in "A Midsummer Night's Dream in Regent's Park", May wonders whether the children who accompany him will look back on this event, as he, retrospectively, does:
And will these children ever think
Again about this leaf-lit scene-
Even a single turning branch
Glimmer in their darker green?
Perhaps one moment when the sky
Was dropping dusk light from above
Will touch their eyes with tenderness
Before another night of love.
