Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow

In careful rhythms, the 21 poems of this British poet's fourth collection describe the "collision" of opposites that Londoners and other city dwellers live with daily: e.g., the city's smell of "Peking duck and piss." Repo-men and aging chess players, pigeons and Chinese supermarkets, sidewalk preachers and railway station bars all populate these neat stanzas. While echoing Larkin in his desire to look unflinchingly, Hill is ultimately more optimistic about the human condition. Many poems insist on some kind of sweetness, even a lost one, as in the penultimate section of "A Year in London," a poem with a section for each month; after suggesting bombs falling, the poem ends with fireworks: "[a]nd all that brilliance was ours / in our dreams that night." Hill also sounds at times like Frost, another polestar for plainspoken poets: describing a young couple fixing up an abandoned house, he writes, "[a]ll this was years ago. And now you're here, / the two of you scything the bittersweet." Occasionally, what Hill (Zoo , 1998) encounters in the contemporary world is so awful that only silence or disbelief are appropriate: "[t]he death toll mounts every morning. / It grows unspeakable." (July 15)