Near-Life Experience by Rowland Bagnall review – the time traveller’s life

The British poet’s second collection is an exacting examination of the past, the present and an uncertain future

Poetry is a form of scrutiny, an inquiry that, when it succeeds, advances further than it is possible to go in prose. Rowland Bagnall’s attractively questing second collection is an investigation of consciousness. Like Virginia Woolf, he records moments of being although, unlike her, his moments are likely to be guarded and seldom ecstatic and to involve openly philosophical reckoning. He is curious about how to situate himself – and by implication us – in time and space. The recognition that time can neither hold or be held is at once an ongoing preoccupation – and a provocation. In The Hare, he lends the day a human quality: “I wake into the morning / and find unanimous spring / and the windows are pale with filtered light / and the day asks, How shall I survive myself?” Time runs out and into Bagnall’s writing and, at the same time, each piece is a moment of standing still (the day can survive in a poem).

The poems themselves seem to stand to attention in this fine, exacting and hyper-vigilant project in which he cross-examines the present, past and most often (he is in his 30s) an unsteady future.