Tim Kendall was the founder-editor of Thumbscrew, one of the best British poetry magazines of the 1990s: though now folded. An academic and poet who brought a lively sense of the contemporary scene to his journal, this is his first full collection.

Strange Land takes its title, as the cover blurb tells us, from the Book of Psalms: though without a referenced epigraph, for either book or title sequence. In fact the territory it enters is perhaps closer to the Book of Ruth. Keats's Ruth 'in tears amid the alien corn' ("Ode to a Nightingale") has accustomed readers of English poetry to the transformative qualities of alienation. And Kendall's book grapples with the paradox of an alienated observer. If alienation thrusts the speaker of these poems away from his subjects, observation draws him towards them.

This may be both an existential problem and one of poetics. Perhaps the most obviously alienated poem in the book is that based on the mediaeval "Ship of Fools". The mediaeval original is a metaphor for humanity as a whole. There's a tension therefore between judgemental narrative and the sense of our own implication on ship-board. In Kendall's version, the fools are poets: 'Small wonder that the nation should discuss' ways to get rid of them, his poet-narrator tells us. The poets are tricked into embarking on their proverbial ship, where 'Knowledge was our drug; later, we'd unwind/By dashing off short lyrics'. - Foolish behaviour? Later, after the necessary shipwreck, the same narrator swears vengeance on 'the monstrous killers of my friends'. It's a funny poem; and read live probably works well. But on the page we can't help wondering what its point is: that all poetry is self-indulgent? That poets should expect less public support, or behave better when they get it?

We're left with a slight sense of material not quite under control; and elsewhere in this short but ambitious book there are other slippages, too. Sometimes it's a question of register: when the narrator of "Eggbuckland" says he and his friend Joe - a teenager who likes whizzing downhill on his bike whistling Die Fledermaus and goes in for kicking - are 'the toughest meanest gang for miles', we expect affectionate irony, not realist narrative. Or sometimes an inaccuracy creeps in: we get a dead vulture in a stream, 'its wings crucified' when surely it's the whole bird which makes the shape of a cross.

And yet at other moments Kendall's language is sumptuous, allusive. The 'blowsabella rose unfolding its/etceteras of passion' gives us not only a beautiful anthropomorphism but Rilke's erotic rose poems and an e.e.cummings euphemism. "Hwaet" is a virtuosic compendium of other poets' lines. The book's opening prose-poem, "Divorce", achieves its effect by careful juxtaposition of moments of childish consciousness.

Kendall's writing is informed by a profound knowledge of British poetry. The best pieces in this book are exceptional in their subtlety, control and elegance: the relativity anti-sonnet "Eurydice"; the quietly-spoken "Astronuats"; a "Fugue" on fear; the distancing of "Bonaguil" remembered; and "At Keith Douglas's Grave", a lament for the great second world war poet. Its second stanza comes alive in breakages which offer space for real emotion:

& anyway the summer shone -
so when I dream him now alive
he promises to tell me all again
& starts to talk & joy & tears

The title sequence of Strange Land makes the poet's struggle with perspective explicit. Ten fifteen-line poems arranged in tercets, formal in diction though not in strict metre, give us ways of looking: mysticism, prayer, mirrors, the museum objet on display, a telescope and, finally, the off-key story-making which locks couples together, for better and for worse. Clicking together without direct reference to each other, like vertebrae, these short poems act as the book's spine. It is a volume which does indeed stand up. In "Ecce Homo", the best poem in the book, spare diction and an unflinching gaze at the 'skeleton/entombed below the Cross' lift the whole project to clarity: the "Strange Land" we encounter is, after all, the one we're natives of:

Imagine: I take
a syringe, so, and probe
our one flesh for a vein.

Strange Land, Carcanet, £6.95 (54 pp).

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.