 ‘Lake Water’ declares “The plane of the water is like a page on which / Phrases and even sentences are written”.Yet as the poet tries to compose, “The surface of the page is like lake water” and later again all is “erased with the changing of the breeze”.For all their elegance and plain-speaking, these poems are marvellously unstable, modern, poignantly facing up to the limits of the faulty equipment we are given to understand the world.