When I was beginning to think the game was up,
    So late in the day, to distil from anxieties
    Something more accountable than dreams
    To allay the rational fear of losing ground.
    And courage wasn't called for, after all.
    It is the one you dream about that counts.
    This morning it was like breathing underwater.

'Breathing Underwater'

In That Stranger, The Blues, James Keery's first book of poems, there is an extraordinary fusion between a poetry of landscapes, indebted to Edward Thomas and Robert Frost, and the radical strategies of the poets of the New York and Cambridge schools. Understated, like watercolours in an age of gaudy acrylics, his lyric poems and his longer 'narratives' explore language and their subjects with passionate fidelity. Limiting himself to the verifiable and perceptible, his poems grow resonant with unaggressive clarities.

As a critic, Keery is a lucid interpreter of writing from various apparently exclusive groups, camps or movements. His poetry is characterised by an equal openness. There is nothing imitative or magpie-ish in his gathering of energy and resource from the work of Michael Haslam, W.S.Graham, Philip Larkin or J.H.Prynne: it is simply that he refuses to subscribe to the general view of unbreachable divisions -- of geography, gender or poetics -- within our culture. Claiming access to the widest poetic territory, he brings an unusual discipline and an unusual freedom into play in his work.