Colette Bryce’s new collection begins with a short lyric about a spider trapped beneath a wineglass – an image of entrapment which reflects the cramped poem itself, and re-appears, either in form or content, throughout Self-Portrait in the Dark. The poet uses rhyme to provide closure:

I meant to let him go
but still he taps against the glass
all Marcel Marceau
in the wall that is there but  not there,
a circumstance I know.

The effect of this kind of poem is definite and exciting – but it only works once, a single blow, a thrown-off, bitty epiphany. Like Wittgenstein’s speaker trapped in his linguistic fly bottle, Bryce seems to feel trapped by language, cautious of its blurriness, moving tactfully from sound to sound, line to line with a demanding economy. In ‘On Highgate Hill’, a poem about Coleridge’s funeral, her depiction of the cortege takes this style to its limit:

It filters through the gates of Highgate Church.

It narrows through the doorway’s solemn arch.

What else?
Selected words are said.
A box is lowered into earth.
Mourners gradually disperse
like images on the surface of a stream
into which a stone is cast.

The taut slant rhymes on church and arch, else and disperse structure these lines firmly – we feel not only a familiar lyric transitoriness, but also the way in which the particularly ‘selected words’ we use to try and hold down experience are themselves a means of its dispersal. Occasionally Bryce’s rigorous scepticism about the possibilities of language becomes wearisome, a shade too glum, as when in ‘Nature Walk’ she modulates into a kind of Chaucerian occupatio:

If only my bag had been large enough,
I would have brought the lonely men in parked cars
by the river. I would have brought the woman
dabbing kohl tears with the heel
of her hand.

Regardless of the actual bag, which turns out to contain only ‘some bark,  and a couple of conkers, / one still half-encased in its skin like an eye’, it’s clear that Bryce’s prosodic bag of tricks – her own subtle and meticulous eye – is far more capacious, and one wishes her attractive lyric voice sometimes placed more confidence in its own abilities. One wants less of the Hamlet-style despair of ‘Sin Musica’ – ‘I rearrange this useless clutter / of words, words’ – and more of those adventurously descriptive poems where she decides to stretch her wings and take a risk with a more generous poetic line.

The excerpt from ‘Nature Walk’, for example, with its hint of urban despair imperfectly smoothed over, holds little weight when compared to the award-winning ‘Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-Mirror’, where the speaker notes of her shattered reflection that she has ‘make-up on,’

a smudging of pencil, brushed black lashes.
I’d swear the face looks younger than before,
the skin sheer, the fine wires of laughter
disappeared without the animation.
The lips are slack, pink, segmented;
a slight gravitational pull towards the earth

gives the upper one a sort of Elvis curl.

This is the contemporary lyric at its most carefully poised and balanced, and it demonstrates Bryce’s significant, if self-deprecating intelligence – here, her words do succeed in going out into the world and bringing something genuine back. The same could be said of the traipsing three-line stanza of interestingly varied line-length which she uses in ‘Twelve’ –

There was mud on the ground and trees on either side and a mess
of undergrowth.  A waist-high broken branch
where a strand of hair

had snagged, was pointed out.  A clearing where a vehicle,
conceivably, could have turned round.

As the line-breaks send a roving spotlight across the prose-rhythm, its details stand out with a terrible clarity, developing that almost morbid specificity of attention which Bryce takes even further in her accomplished sestina ‘The Harm’, which follows Heaney and Muldoon in using the form to develop an atmosphere of obliquely impending violence:

On the walk to school you have stopped
at the one significant lamppost, just to be sure
(if you’re late where’s the harm?),
and are tracing the cut of the maker’s name in raised print
and yes, you are certain it is still ticking,
softly ticking where it stands on the corner

opposite McCaul’s corner-
shop. Not that you had expected it to stop.
At worst, all you’ll get from the teacher is a good ticking
off. When it goes off, and you are sure
it will be soon, this metal panel with its neat square print
will buckle like the lid of Pandora’s tin...

Bryce strains the form deliberately like Muldoon, ‘ticking / off’ the requisite line-endings almost ploddingly sometimes, but there’s also something original and vivid in her handling of the sestina, the way she catches the rhythms of Irish speech and plays them skilfully against the demands of the rhyme –

‘For God’s sake stay on the pavement out of harm’s
way!’ the woman who grabs you says. ‘Sure
haven’t you been taught how to cross a road?

The colloquial clumsiness of that second line – ‘the woman who grabs you says’ – is nicely offset by the vernacular ‘sure’, whose enjambment seamlessly fulfils the sestina form while also preserving what Robert Frost would call a distinctive sentence-sound, the active excitement of speech. As a result, a type of poem which risks becoming overwrought, brittle and unreal actually goes the other way – it’s as sharp and clear as the child’s encounter in cold air.

That sense of the real thing happening clearly as the verse records it also makes for one of the most absorbing poems in the volume, ‘Belfast Waking, 6 a.m’, which picks up, in a sense, where ‘The Harm’ left off. The central figure of this anti-aubade is a telephone box maintenance man whose eerie outline accrues more and more solidity as the poem moves determinedly onwards, as

he wrinkles his nose at the tang of urine,
furrows his brow at a broken syringe
then finally turns to the stoical machine,

the dangling receiver’s plaintive refrain
please replace the handset
and try again,

unclogs the coin-choked gullet with a tool
and a little force
like a shoulder to a wheel
or an act of necessary violence.

This sensuous, free-form style is immediately exciting, as Bryce allows her talent for sheer evocation more free-range than usual – her lopped, skeptical verse-line is capable of so much more than merely protesting its own supposed inadequacies.

Colette Bryce, Self-Portrait in the Dark, Picador, 2008. £ 8.99. ISBN 978-0330456258

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.