Blame it on postcard-sending Martians in the 1970s, but whimsy has long been out of fashion as a mode in British poetry. Raffishly pleased with itself, the whimsical poem encounters reality through a sensibility worn like a protective suit such as that sported by Tristram Fane Saunders’s “Oneiroscopist”, for whom “The diving helmet is a perfect fit”. With its miniaturist descriptions, pseudo-translations and emotional reserve, the whimsical credentials of Before We Go Any Further are, on the face of it, strong.

This would be a misreading, though. Far from being static and uninvolved, the voice of Fane Saunders’s brilliant debut is more often than not in a state of disarray. The speaker of “Weather About the Talking” announces that he wants to “kill a dachshund” before drifting through a series of fugue states that look suspiciously like snapshots from lockdown. Struggling to impose some semblance of order on experience, could the poet, in the words of “The Somnambulist”, be “Edward Scissorhands without the scissors?”.

Seamus Heaney’s work is all aura and the ghosts of childhood, but “Most Haunted” pursues the antiseptic spaces least imbued with the past, where a ghost’s visits “decreased / to once a year, a chore / he might neglect”. Poetry as a bridge between the living and the dead encounters a further road-block in “The Medium”, where we learn that “The recent late don’t give / a damn for you, your questions”. Instead the dead are busy listening for “their own absent speakers / a generation further off”. Only connect, counselled E. M. Forster, but frequently what we get here are missed encounters, awkward silences, states of being “lost / in the living maze”.

Yet in the book’s final stretch the static clears and words begin to hit home in unexpected ways. “Bonfire” permits itself a louche intimacy: ”Like a beating toffee apple, my heart in your mouth.” “2nd Edition” concludes the book with a meditation on The Oxford Book of English Verse, received in the post from his divorced father – the same volume once used as a gift for the poet’s mother, and inscribed “with love, from me to you”. Fane Saunders surveys time’s follies and wonders “Why / not, for a gift, forgive you?”, before closing with the anthology’s opening poem, “Sumer is icumen in / lhude sing cuccu”. Before We Go Any Further is a book about turbulence and disorientation,...