One moment human

David Bunn's second book of poems spans a decade of published and unpublished writing. The poems include speech about politics, society and settler colonialism but also consider painting, the uses of travel, gravity waves, earthquakes, love, landscape, sculling, age, wine, war, geology, translation, vision, the Big Bang, the succession of the generations, death and the squaring of things with your father. They do this in forms which respond to writers such as Dante and Auden, and to musicians like Keith Jarrett and Vivaldi. They include a set of verse letters written during the early pandemic on writing, art and plague. The drive is to find what lies behind first appearances, myth, commonplace, deceptive and insulating formulae, and stunted rhetoric. They aspire to be as healthful as Wordsworth or as radically beautiful as Camille Pissarro, but as Dr Johnson said, explaining why he was a failed philosopher, cheerfulness always keeps on breaking in.