On Purpose, by Nick Laird

The art of war – and marriage

Nick Laird's second volume of poems, On Purpose, follows swiftly on the heels of his notable 2005 debut To a Fault, and his more patchily admired semi-autobiographical "lad-lit" novel, Utterly Monkey. Here we see Laird continuing his politically-aware poetics which combine a searching intellect with a lyrical impulse – qualities which might seem prerequisite for any poet of lasting value. While its poetic territories are being continuously set up and trespassed upon, Laird's work is best seen not as having ghosts with whom to battle but ancestors – Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and, Paul Muldoon for starters – with whom energetically to converse and to engage.

Laird sees the personal and the political as inextricably connected and, perhaps unsurprisingly, wars are his presiding theme. His 12-part sequence about marriage is framed (maybe unhappily if you're a wife) through Sun Tzu's The Art of War. "You swear," he writes in "Waging War", "that it's me who's obsessed with war, / the sting of a nettle, a national recession, / monsoons and ice avalanches, / and any particular / type of fucking depression".

Laird continues to be preoccupied by the fragment; a lost piece from a photograph, for example, which has been turned into a jigsaw and which the poem's speaker "will try, / repeatedly, to identify" as sea or sky. He writes in "Appraisal" about how "Words are just pieces", "articulating / tiny myths of struggle and deliverance. / I think they're appealing. I don't mean as in pleasing."

On Purpose contains a considerable number of seemingly effortless dramatic monologues (themselves a poetic version of a fragment). "Lipstick", spoken in the voice of a soldier, tells the moving and shocking story of women in the concentration camps putting on make up ("Everlasting Rouge") before their liberation: "I still see that shade at times, / on hoardings or the high road, young mums, some skinny girl / who's coloured in the colour of her screams".

Much is written about "that tricky second book". On Purpose is both continuation and relaxed elaboration of Laird's first. It is less nervily self-aware, more willing to warm to the lyrical, without any sacrifice to edginess, and all the time written with a tautness than never dampens down an incipient energy.

There's a resigned anger at the war-ridden, environmentally damaged world, and its ultimate fuel, consumer culture. As he ends in the first of two poems called "The Present Writer": "Advertisements cannot be the last things singing praises / and you have nothing to sell but the earth itself./ The fraudulent taught you the power of prayer, / or a form of prayer. Concentration is a form of prayer, / and patience, also." There's a sense in this book of a poet growing quickly, and gaining the kind of authority that will bring increasing intellectual and emotional licence, suggesting there is more – and even better – to come.

Deryn Rees-Jones's poetry collection 'Quiver' is published by Seren

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