A Welcome Experiment - Rated 
How refreshing it is to come across a poetry collection that is both innovative and thoughtful. David Morley's Scientific Papers takes as its provocative starting point the concept that one can draw an analogy between the work of the poet and the scientist: both are concerned, though in different ways, with knowing and exploring the world. As well as including individually brilliant poems, Morley's collection incorporates groups of thematically-linked texts which explore different 'worlds', ranging from the natural to the personal. This includes a sequence of poems in which Morley explores his family's origins: poems such as 'Clearing a Name', which tells the story of a gypsy uncle shot in dubious circumstances by the police; and 'Moonlighter' an acerbic modern lyric about a light-fingered traveller brother who 'will scrabble through the mud of everything:/ the nuts and nuggets of marriage, a bolt of a ring,/ weights of children, slack pulleys of police'. Similar themes - marginalisation, exile, and stigmatisation - recur in Morley's series of poems inspired by the tragic life of Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam (such as the haunting 'Osip Mandelshtam on the Nature of Ice'). There are lighter, more playful moments in the collection, too, as when Morley turns an Einstein equation into 'Two Haiku Pennants' and 'The Motion of Deer', in which his language mimics as well as describing the movement of deer. In poems such as 'The Goodnight' and 'St Lucy's Day' Morley proves himself to be a fine writer of romantic verse, too, eschewing sentimentality and cliché for a love poetry which is raw and sinewy. All in all, the variety of Scientific Papers makes it a rich and impressive collection; and suggests that there will be much to look forward to when Morley publishes the second part of his planned poetic trilogy.
Worthy but lacking poetic flair - Rated 
There is certainly a sense of effort about this work, but little grace or linguistic flair. 'The weather is a television with the aerial down' is vaguely reminiscent of Craig Raine's line 'Rain is when the earth is television', but is seemingly scrambled through simultaneous translation. It is also difficult to perceive a convincing relationship between form and content in these poems, making the reader wonder if they would be better expressed in prose. On the plus side, it is better than some of Morley's other work, and does not have the specious political elements of the book he edited to bring light and oxygen to the NHS.
Mandelstam Reborn - Rated
This kind of work is rare. Like Chaplin, or Mandelstam, it'd hard to think they coexisted. This is an equally rare book with a hard-won playfulness and tired determination to live and write out of the almost giving-up. A book for survival which I read when I needed it.
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