Seductive fantasies and anecdotes about sexual antics lie alongside mysterious pieces and deeper poems to his partner. He moves deftly from the modern 'Incident in a Filing Cupboard' to 'Always', a timeless fantasy about a farmer's daughter. He is as good at the metre of conversational patter as he is at the rhythms of lyric. Lithium', for example, subverts the sonnet form with content about casual sex rather than love. Elsewhere traditional subject matter is rendered contemporary.
Wit is a weapon of seduction and there is plenty here.
In the Wedding Museum' adapts the Miss Havisham image of decayed marriage items and effectively sustains the museum conceit. Some of the poems read like fables enabling us to foresee how our own affairs might conclude. Here 'The Book of Love' is seen as a bible full of parables from which we may choose our own story. It suggests the trace of a different reading, in which we might see the collection as an address book we can use to make a date with each poem. Perhaps the similarities, the modernity, the half-rhymes and the metrical momentum building to memorable conclusions, are merely coincidences to be blamed on the Zeitgeist.