At the vet, in line for desexing

Tristram Fane Saunders enjoys a performance poet’s pared-back break-up verses

RUNNING UPON THE WIRES by Kate Tempest 56pp, Picador, £9.99, ebook £9.99

After two Mercury-nominated albums, three plays and a novel, Kate Tempest, at the tender age of 32, seemed to have tried everything. But the pared-back simplicity of these love poems marks a new direction. Gone are the Greek myths and novelistic characters of her earlier work. Instead, we’re in break-up territory, an intimate world too small for names. Three sections – “the end”, “the middle” and “the beginning” (the poems in each have equally functional titles) – chart her separation from her wife, and a new romance, though the timeline’s intentionally hazy.

Tempest, a charismatic live performer, is equally indebted to William Blake and the rappers of Wu-Tang Clan, and it’s the former’s Songs she channels in “Awake all night thinking of you”, a bruised ballad: “Everything was

Argument/ And everywhere was Rage/ Opinion wrung her whittled hands/ And settled in her cage”.

Themes recur, encounters flirt with cliché – but that’s the point, as she reassures lover and reader alike in the elegant final poem: “Yes, we do repeat. Motifs/occur again, again// This does not mean/we are not new// You are not her./ This is not then.”

Elsewhere, she’s a flâneur, observing the world with tragicomic bathos. In “On finding photographs you took of us”, the heartbroken poet is distracted by people at the local vet, “in line for the desexing offered to residents of the borough”.

There are a few clunkers: one poem, “So I moved back to the old neighbourhood”, is eerily close to Alan Partridge’s Scissored Isle spoof of edgy verse, while another’s bland cross-rhymed pentameters feel like sub-par Wendy Cope. But the high points are high indeed; a short lyric called “Firework” soars like one. I found Running Upon the Wires irresistible, flaws and all. If you’ve avoided the ubiquitous Tempest till now, this might win you over.