Sitting as it does above a poem about a cool, contemporary world, a title like ‘Poem on 27^th Birthday’ sounds anachronistic. I hear echoes of ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucie’s Day’, ‘Verses On the Death of Dr Swift’ and so on. What role can occasional poetry play, George asks, now that poetry has ceased to happen occasionally? Art and song have become so bound up in other forms of contemporary cultural experience that the critical task of judging how to respond to them – ‘a sculpture of two people kissing should dare / a timid heart to back itself’ – has to be supplemented by simply identifying them: ‘I / should know the name of this song’. In such a world, any sense of a song’s particular origin can be occluded: after a brief, ‘homely’ acknowledgement that a tune is ‘Anglophonic’, it simply becomes the Fiat’s for the rest of the poem; it may have also been heard ‘with’, significantly no longer on or through, ‘a talent show’. This occlusion might stop us from appreciating that the place where songs emerge from is, fundamentally, mysterious: allowing a song to be ‘nothing less / than the Glory of Love’, for all that it allows a total overlap of medium with message, might distract us from letting love remain somehow inexpressible, ‘a mute glory’.

Can the traditional model, of the poet who distinctively and difficultly shapes mute experience into a poem, be reclaimed? The conventional marks of lyric poetry no longer seem entirely appropriate. If a lyric is defined as an ‘I’ addressing a ‘you’, its most direct instances in this poem come as interruptions. The line ending with ‘I belong to you’ becomes the only one in its stanza to end on a vowel, and disrupts an otherwise cohesive set of end-words, in which each shares at least one phoneme with another. ‘You belong to me’ abruptly shuts down an emerging set of end- and internal rhymes, ‘to anything’ with ‘so lacking’, ‘blancmange’ with ‘demands’. The other rare moments when ‘I’ and ‘you’ are brought together within a grammatical structure equally feel like platitudes: ‘you’re my luck’, ‘you’re my sweetheart’, ‘ain’t no stopping us’. The only way in which lyric address can be reclaimed is apparently through distance and irony, through a speaker declaring that the addressee is ‘far’ off while she is addressed, transforming her into a ‘sculpture’ but one still ‘blooming into flesh and breath’.

This second privilege of the lyric poet, to transform lived experience by creating original metaphors, is ironised most clearly in the fourth stanza: here, an elaborate extended conceit is itself bloated, uncomfortable in its excess, a pudding over-egged. It’s a sensation achieved through a combination of the very choice of subject matter and its status as the only such conceit in the poem. Elsewhere, George’s ability to perform the expected metaphorical thinking breaks down. He is ultimately unable to find an imaginative point of reference with which to describe the sculpture, because the description ‘a weight of metal that stuck in my chest’ has already elided literal and figurative understandings of weight. Sometimes, the arrangement of his literal descriptions of the world work against the images that a reader’s own patterns of cognition might be inclined to form. So soon after the unusual image of ‘a baby mauling the sides of his pram’, the references to his dad simultaneously ‘lipping’ and ‘thumbing’ objects might faintly evoke a description of a more conventional infantile activity, one which the poem itself never presents.

If the possibility of appropriate-sounding lyric metaphors is lost, it is because we have become used to accepting that our whole experience is subsumed under metaphors we live by: it might seem grotesque to think quite so hard about life as a meal but, by this point in the poem, a description of music as ‘fruity’ and one’s self as ‘a honey trap for wasps’ has already passed us by; it is easy, in conversation, to describe wasps as ‘bug[ging] me’ without appreciating the pun that George quietly intends. It is these kinds of ironic gesture that seem the poem’s most virtuosic and graceful, that go down most easily – but this grace can only be recognised because of the contrast that they establish with the laboured digestion conceit, just as George’s fleeting subtle approach to traditions of lyric address is exposed as a counterpoint to the banal one favoured by pop songs.

George’s poem succeeds insofar as it does not – quite – live up to its claim to surrender any ‘friction’ in the face of ‘sickly charms’, charms which are offered both by contemporary culture and  those established conventions of lyric which are apparently detached from that culture, but which might have come to influence it. Its music is somewhere between the barely-noticed car muzak which forms the texture of the contemporary world and The Rites of Spring, whose hardcore punk aesthetic insistently rejects this texture. It is a fine balance executed through George’s use of metre. While his local management of rhythmic patterning is masterful, he moves in and out of these patterns in a manner that feels spontaneous and artless. The final stanza, for example, eventually falls into a steady iambic pentameter, characterised in all of its last three lines by dropped initial syllables and interpolated stresses (on both syllables in each of ‘one month’, ‘halfway’, ‘I did-’). Its opening line, however, can’t quite be scanned as such, though it would only take the removal of ‘though’ to allow it to fit easily with the lines that immediately follow. The experience of this first line’s rhythm is illusion-shattering, more akin to noticing when ‘the osteria flips the disc’ than to the pleasing set of variations executed by Teddy Pendergrass ‘over his chorus line’.

The most spectacular shattering of metrical illusion, and of political self-delusion, comes when seven lines of anapaestic tetrameter – a metre we are conditioned to think of as not resembling real speech – gives way to a line opening on two consecutive stresses: ‘nerve gas’, really being fired elsewhere. It might feel crass to suggest that a shift in a poem’s rhythm serves as an imitation of a gas attack but, just as he does with his comparison of living to gorging himself, George has created a poem which can inhabit both the idea and its crassness simultaneously. Rhythm can be understood as somehow in the air, but also ultimately experienced somatically; poetic rhythm alters the body’s ability to construct and respond to meaning. Yet this shift is nevertheless just one (very extreme) example of the kind of rhythmic variation that has occurred throughout the poem, and more regular patterns will resume as the poem continues into its second half.

Furthermore, these local sites of adjustment and staged violence mask a deeper coherence in George’s musical thinking, one that might emerge unconsciously and remain mysterious even to him. After using the word ‘strum’ to describe the Fiat’s song twice within the poem’s first half, and perhaps bolstered by the play of ‘pram’ against ‘thumbing’ when describing the ‘likely dad’, words ending in ‘m’ continue to be associated with the Fiat song’s quotidian recurrence: it is ‘homely’, a ‘jam’ and a ‘noodly hum’. I’d dare to argue that the tension between resisting and submitting to the ‘sickly charm’ of modernity’s debased lyric comes to rest within the recurrence of this phoneme: by maintaining deeper, private music throughout the poem, George can reach a point of ‘calm’ where he can, now sincerely, ‘affirm / you’re my sweetheart’. In a contingent contemporary world, where, to paraphrase Marshall Berman, all that is solid (like George’s sculpture) might melt into air and vice versa, the very occasion of writing a lyric might secure a crucial site of double resistance.