This review was published last week in London Grip.

The poet himself is a gentlemanly presence throughout this, his fifth collection, never more so than when he’s introducing ‘Deliverance, 1961’ the novella-in-thirty-two-cantos which takes up the back half of the book. Like a good-natured aide conducting us to the office of an eccentric royal, he’s at pains to explain the poem’s form (so that we may better appreciate it) and prepare us for the dubious views and behaviours of his period characters (so that we might refrain from judging them unkindly). The same care and courteousness is evident in the arrangement of many of the shorter poems – impeccably detailed realist dioramas, drawn from various stages of life – and in the overall structure of the book, which is divided into ‘Our Better Selves’, ‘Our Lesser Selves’ and ‘Our Contemptible Selves’, so as to faithfully depict psychological messiness in as neat a fashion as possible.

It’s light on symbolism and metaphysical conceit (‘Icarus Foiled’, with its debt to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, is the most out-of-place poem – a political parable using figures from myth) but rich in cultural bric-a-brac and recollected fragments of dialogue. Sometimes these are presented as tragic remnants (“a toy, a Styrofoam / ramen cup, shoes (many shoes), a broken yellow / spatula, a black Yomiuri Giants baseball cap” begins the list in ‘Japanese Debris Field Arrives on B. C. Shores After 2011 Earthquake’), other times as precious keepsakes. Bridgman is unquestionably modern and liberal in his outlook – poems concerning a pompous, controlling patriarch and a child learning to ride a bike, for instance, are likely drawn from first-hand experience, but could easily be ads for life insurance products, such is their familiar relatability. I had never heard of Irpin before I read ‘A Mercy Undeserved: Irpin, March 2022’, but I knew within a few lines that it must be a Ukrainian city, since the book is elsewhere eager to acknowledge the contemporary global milieu. This is not a criticism, by the way – just to note that I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite so much like what I would expect from an evening’s conversation with a thoroughly polite, well-adjusted and socially conscientious dinner guest.

Similarly, in terms of form, smart-casual dominates – clean, lightly patterned lines, some very long, with one tightly cinched concrete poem and occasional unforced rhymes. It’s a warm, welcoming volume, keenly demonstrating both tonal range and worldliness – not to mention that Bridgman is an attentive student of key figures in the 20th-century poetical canon. But its best moments might be its sloppiest and nastiest: ‘A Pie in the Face of the Betrayed’ is a viciously surreal portrait of an emotionally reticent husband or boyfriend splattering his partner with half-eaten pudding as he finally snaps. She’s memorably described going down in a burning plane – except that it’s surrounded by “billowing meringue” as his “false, sticky reassurances / drip down from the overhead / speakers”. And the two poems ventriloquising a curmudgeon – part of a longer sequence, it sounds like – are deliciously petty:

Joshua rights his head slowly, as if it’s being winched
up off a welding table by an invisible block and tackle.
He sighs in resignation.

I decide not to correct him, for now, on his use of “Dad”.
I’m not his father. I’m not even his father-in-law.
(They’re shacked up.)

(‘Ariana Grande Comes to Lunch: A Modern Tableur en Famille’)

The novella, meanwhile, is a mellifluous double character study, set mostly on a sleeper train and told through flashbacks. It’s a sort of melancholic, grittier, muckier spin on Brief Encounter; the protagonists’ paths cross just the once, and they’re likely totally ill-suited for each other, despite the fact that each is fleeing a life of bleak disappointment. The takeaway might be that a few hours of embarrassed kindness are all we can reasonably hope for, and make something of, in the wake of our mistakes.