A dead cockroach, a dehumidifier, a poisoned rat - there doesn't seem to be anything that may not inspire Judy Brown to one of her richly coloured, adroitly metaphysical mediations. Crowd Sensations bursts at the seams with brilliant, wayward imagery that is her hallmark, from the rat's "coffee-bean spoor" (A Trapped Rat Finds Another Kind of Freedom) to the couple's hands locked in "prisonish happiness // like dogs disturbed at mating, who stuck" (Memorial). Each poem, in one way or another, shows us how language can newly interrogate the familiar world. Some themes, or roles, recur: such as the poet as a roving, solitary reporter on the sheer weirdness of overnighting in B&B's (the various Songs from West Cumbria, Was This Review Helpful to You?). Although I enjoyed the men "hooting like elephant seals" in Carlisle, and the owners "talking business in their sagging tracksuits" in another godforsaken hangout, I found these poems less fully dimensional than those in which bravura images are linked to a more lasting, less avoidable experience. In Unsafe Harbour, for instance, comparison of a lump found in a woman's breast with a would-be "isolate city with sealed gates" gains power from its close alignment of details from both worlds: "Neck, armpit, and groin - these are places / of grain and pulse - basin and channel where / ships pause to spill their cargoes, where hawsers / tear into their moorings". Here, words like 'grain', 'pulse', 'spill' and 'tear' make the bodily peril arrestingly real. I have to say that, after several readings, some poems (e.g. The Third Umpire) still puzzle me, and others seem to fall away a bit with their final line (Skymap Says We're Nowhere Near Home) - nevertheless, I'll keep going back to this collection to sample its profligate brilliance and truly enviable inventiveness. 

A poem is neither a junkshop nor scrapyard: you can't dump any random object there, cross your fingers and hope it'll work. But when a poem incorporates something unusual, not as bric-à-brac or ornament, but as an integral part of its being, that is one sign of good writing. So, on the first couple of pages of Judy Brown's second collection, it's intriguing to find diptychs, Dralon reclines and the Gulf of Mexico. The presence of objects so disparate and under-represented in contemporary poetry, yet precisely effective in context, gives promise of surprise and quality to come. And reading on, we encounter calamari, a beige-tiled fireplace, elephant seals, bus drivers, macramé, dog-bowls and a telesales job.

Brown's objects are animate with energy: 'Stairs/ strut and coil like tempters'; 'trams spark and rattle'; town rain 'splits and skids'; life bides its moment 'to sprint and scatter'. The language works by exactness, 'the iPod snicking in its dock', that verb 'snicking' giving a close fit and sharp click.

Accuracy is all the more essential when poems probe emotional extremes and are 'trolled by horrors'.Precision wards off exaggeration and flailing. Consider the rat which has 'nibbled/the pink sachets of pearlescent freshbait'. 'Freshbait' is verbally fresh in that it is not in the OED and 'pearlescent' evokes a glossy aspirational world of glassware, jewellery and lipstick. The word 'sachets' is redolent of perfume, potpourri or cosmetics freebies, which adds a frisson to the bag of poison. And 'nibbled' conveys exactly the right sense of biting tentatively, or feeding repeatedly with small bites, whilst also intimating erotic play, later fleshed out by the phrases 'just you and me' and 'a nice touch'. The erotic subtext tips into disgust with the 'rat's coffee-bean spoor'. Then the connotations of 'bump off', 'by-blow', 'mummify' and 'queasy stomach' call up murder, pregnancy, bastardy and abortion. The central tableau presents the rat's corpse on the sofa('(O, Jesus/the sofa)') where that 'O, Jesus'(cradled in parentheses) is no empty oath, but conjures a gotesque counter-Nativity crib-scene, with the dead rat as changeling Christ-child. The details are neat: Darren’s ‘latex-gloves’ speak of both contact and distance and maybe subliminally suggest ‘late’, ‘ex’ and ‘love’ attaching to this rat or some other love-rat.

Brown is idiosyncratic and archetypal at the same time. In ‘Poem in the Voice of a Dead Cockroach’, the cockroach, dead ‘in the guest bathroom/of a Spanish-style villa at Chung Hom Kok’ becomes a universal soldier, whose last testament ranges(menacingly, comically) from First World War trenches, back to Spartans holding the pass, then Vikings, and forward into some evolutionary future, ‘the longest haul’. Its register or discourse-category swings from a colloquial ‘sod-all’ to the legalese of ‘albeit that’.

These poems are alert to threat, especially physiological threats, human beings as bodies bound to go kaput. Brown writers searchingly of physical malfunction: hypothermia,myopia, chemotherapy, swollen ankles, wrenched muscle, lesions, heart op. So the heart of an octogenarian is a 'fine machine...big and hidden, rumbling in its housing,' like a ship's engine. Conversely, in the dehumidifier, the 'inhuman lungfuls pass across/your plastc gills' and the Japanese power station is not damaged or contaminated but 'wounded'.

A poem, Brown has written, can be 'a vector of metamorphosis, a continuum along which object and image mimic each other and merge'. Something of this is visible in 'Unsafe Harbour':

Neck, armpit and groin- these are places
of grain and pulse-basin and channel where
ships pause to spill their cargos[...]

As 'groin' turns to 'grain', the word 'pulse' becomes a node, suggesting both the edible seeds of leguminous plants('nuts and pulses') and the throbbing bodily arteries('the Mexican bean pulse of your wrist'). Here, 'basin' primarily denotes a tidal dock or harbour whilst it also extends the imagery and kitchen and cooking. The verb 'spill' captures the Heaneyesque sluice-rush of grain tumbling into a hopper and may also recall its medical anagram 'pills'.

There is a king of poem which spins and rotates as a whole by transfiguring its addressee and therefore its putative purpose as a speech-act. Such a poem changes in changing the apparent purpose towards which it directs its mimicry. This happens, I think, in the first poem of the collection, one of those poems where the title runs into the first line: 'After the Discovery of Linear Perspective///You gave us new places to hide.' Who or what is this 'You'? The poem meaning alters according to our understanding of its opening word. If 'You' is God, then He could be giving us new places to hide, perhaps as an act of mercy, as Adam and Eve hid after their Fall. If 'You' is the devil, he could be doing it 'just for the hell.' And if 'You' is the artist or technician, the effect would be playful, more like a game of hide-and-seek. As the verse unfolds all these interpretations and others drop in and out of the play, like a detective story with several plausible suspects. Each possible solution is satisfying in some juicy respect but none is wholly satisfactory. As Helen Vendler might say, a definitive solution is what the poem exists to frustrate. The end result is not bewilderment but wilder exuberance at the opening of tradition and imagination: 'Let's inhale its new space, shout/merely to gather echoes, make gestures that astonish us.

Brown loads many meanings into one word. 'By the fells' long exposures I pass unrecorded.' What are these 'exposures'? In that single word are multiple exposures, from the worlds of (time-lapse) photography, mountaineering and commerce; hints of being unsheltered, abandoned, unmasked; notions of publicity, exhibition, commitment, risk. Likewise, Brown can be mundane and weird all in the same line: 'See how I cook my baked potatoes in the microwave!'. Her poems exist with us, but unlike us, as 'foreground flicker/in this place of deep time', in both the now and another zone where 'you'd notice glass making its slow travel to thicken/the foot of the pane'

Brown's language sounds 'factory-fresh', 'so fresh it's just come on the market'. She chucks in a few 'thugweed' or  vulgarisms to strong effect. Her poems know how to swoop across a stanza break from sacred to profane, 'to stand at the altar//up the duff in stretch lace, bring up child after child,/ giving the finger to time with every hard breech/birth'.

Why the title Crowd Sensations? The word 'sensations' covers the gamut of experience from the normal, everyday operation of the senses; through mental feeling or apprehension; to extraordinary, startling excitement, as in sensational news. The 'Crowd' in the title refers to the contrast between sociability(often here associated with Hong Kong) and solitude(Cumbria). More specifically, poems are set in Sheung Wan, off the A591, in sundry b&bs, on Queen's Road East, Wan Chai, in the neon blaze of the Cup Noodle Building. None of this, Brown says, is exotic. The dichotomy of Self and Others is explored through images from Canetti's Crowds and Power. So a poem which has the word 'sand' in every stanza may call to mind crowds, although the force of the poem has more to do with individual lines such as 'I made a mood board for my sky-blowing wedding'.

Throughout, Judy Brown combines the accurate observation of an Elizabeth Bishop with the energy and estrangement of Plath; along with something of Peter Redgrove's plenitude and refinement of metaphor. These are serious poems which explore love and loss, solitude and society, vulnerability and violence, through language which fizzes with jumpy excitement, 'fresh with the sting and scent of phoenix'. These poems are intense and inventive, full of wit and joie de vivre. Shaped by something transcendental, they are grounded in the technical reality of the drill bit, Medium Density Fibreboard, blockboard, claw-hammer and thermostat. In the literary critical sense, they are 'metaphysical' in their wit, complexity and use of elaborate, intricate schemes of imagery to express ideas and emotional states. And they may also be metaphysical in the sense of Fine Art, using (like Chirico) strange perspectives, bizarre images and incongruous juxtaposition to create mysterious, dream-like effects.

In the opening poem, the protagonist or speaker misses the warmth of the maidens and saints. Another 'I' wants 'to be warm flesh today' and in the collection's final line the I wants 'the warmth on the other side of the wall'. But the collection as a whole is warm and affectionate, with moving poems for father, brother and friends. Its language is a 'volatile pool' or 'blistering cocktail' which moves 'to simmer, to hard boil, to absolute cauldron.' And yet it is also cool: 'cool and troubling', 'supercool and slow'. The seduces us with its 'cool, now irreversible, moves', on the page, in the heart, 'under the cool eyes of your tropical fish'. Poetry this beautiful does that.

Ed Reiss lives and works in Bradford. His book of poetry, Your Sort, was published by smith|doorstop in 2011.

Judy Brown's second collection, Crowd Sensations, is a very different proposition from Sampson's The Catch. This is an exuberant, exspansive poetry, hungry for subject matter that will be enveloped in the poet's sideways look at the world and her bold voice. Something of this exuberance can be seen in the opening poem, 'After the Discovery of Linear Perspective', particularly in the exclamation within this passage:

'Yet I miss their warmth: the maidens and saints twisted to press at the picture plane, all breathy frottage, and damp like flowers under glass.

Come, technician, let us brush past the samey glamours of Joseph

and Mary. Christ, there is so much gorgeous air explaining itself in the back of your painting! Let's inhale its new space, shout merely to gather echoes, make gestures that astonish us.'

Brown specialises in grabbing readerly attention with her first lines and her buttonholing strategies are often delightful. Here are just a few to evidence the verve with which she strikes out onto the page:

'Whole seas had their brine boiled off

to fill this sweating mile with desiccated stuff.' 

('The Street of the Dried Seafood Shops, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong')

'Just about now they are stopping my father's heart.'

('Just About Now')

'First: surely myopia is a priestly calling, 

where the world falls short in long isinglass halls.'

('Poem in Which I Am Not Shortsighted')

'As the hygienist scrimshaws round my gum

I stretch my small mouth wide as horror.'

('We Prayed for a Man Without a Beard')

There is seldom any delay in getting down to business, and while the poems almost always unwind in peculiar directions, those openings still function as executive summaries of each poem's prospectus.

There seems to be very little that Brown won't dare to attempt and she is particularly good at playing the ventriloquist. See, for example, 'The Unbeliever speaks to God', or 'Poem in the Voice of a Dead Cockroach' (there is something of the Ronseal advert about the titles: they do exactly what it says on the tin). In the latter poem, her deceased narrator is found "backflipped; dead afloat / in my long-boat carapace, six legs plaited / into caramel at the thorax". This does not of course stop Brown wresting eighteen lines out of him.

She is also good at writing the personal in unexpected ways. 'This Is Not a Garden' explores a garden, or a yard (the narrator is undecided), and in doing so explores in reality a failed marriage:

'A man made this garden for me, whether

I liked it or not. After I had gone, he let it

go wild, to armoured holly and hawthorn, 

the small beer of thugweeds, but in time

it will settle, a wiry daisy meadow, well-fenced.'

If there is a problem at all with Brown's eclectic, bouncy approach (not for nothing was her debut titles Loudness), then it probably has something to do with the reader's stamina for a whole collection of these poems. Stylistically, there is very little variation from the loose blank pentameter and while the poems often share locations (Hong Kong and Cumbria feature in several, in the latter case due to Brown's recent stint as Poet-in-Residence at Grasmere), it is not always clear what is bringing them together as a unified collection. The poems also pay little regard to the old workshop adage 'show don't tell' and indeed, it is in their loquacious telling that much of her talent appears to lie. Whether that causes concern, of course, is a matter for the individual reader. What you cannot fault is the sheer energy with which Brown tackles her world.