Go Giants

Though Laird (On Purpose) now lives in New York, his third poetry collection looks back insistently to his youth in Northern Ireland, and to the modes and the literature of Ireland and the U.K. Laird’s background can get him compared to Paul Muldoon, but a closer analogue is Glyn Maxwell, whose almost populist ease, and occasional swerves into mystery, Laird shares: his casual fluency, its sense of conversation among the ancient past, English books, Irish towns, and contemporary urbanity may charm or baffle Americans. The two-part collection begins with a miscellany—a delightful light poem of marital love (“Talking in Kitchens”), and another on pregnancy (Laird is married to the novelist Zadie Smith), a whimsical list of clichés (the title poem), a crushing and memorable anecdote about a girl bullied at school. Of “The Future,” Laird writes, “I can tell you that the organizing principle is grief. You will lack weather.” Laird ends with a more diffuse series in unrhymed tercets, its segments named for bits of Pilgrim’s Progress, touching on his own time in New York and Rome; he decides “that the history of history is ridiculous,/ that these specifics were sufficient,” then oscillates between minutiae from travel, recollections of a childhood during the Troubles (“The monotony of always being on a side!”), and metaphysical quotables: “We do as we are told./ The stars are hard and deaf and cold.” (Sept.)