In Faber & Faber’s advertising material, Julia Copus’ latest collection, her third, is assigned four ‘genres and themes’: love; loss; science; introspection. The first two of these categories are hardly unusual bedfellows, playmates or companions; a sizeable chunk of the English poetic canon would fall neatly into these two headings. Lyric lovers seem more prone than most to lose. Or, at least, they are better than most at talking about it.

The World’s Two Smallest Humans opens with just such a poem of love and loss. ‘This Is the Poem in which I Have Not Left You’, as might be deduced from the title, imagines an alternative present where a relationship has not come to an end: ‘I do not turn – my tongue is tied, my hands – [/] whatever there is to say is left unsaid.’ The conversational tone, with corrections and interjections – ‘the cottage. [//] Our cottage, I meant to say’ – also maintains a distance fitting for a poem that walks the boundary of, almost anticlimactic, non-events: ‘And since I dare not speak, nothing transpires.’

It is a self-control that is both representative of the collection as a whole, and that fits with the remaining two of the publisher’s categories. In the collection’s closing sequence, ‘Ghost’, shortlisted separately for the Ted Hughes Award, Copus does take up the theme of science, charting her own experiences of IVF treatment. In the end, however, it is another non-event, another example of love and loss. When she discusses the pregnancy test, she describes ‘the single band of purple [/] and beside it the silvery ghost of a second line [//] willed into being’. But the ‘yet-to-be [/] son or daughter’ ‘did not come’. Faced with such a difficult subject, and one with which the poet has so a personal engagement, it would be easy for these poems to be tinged with desperation, for Copus to break from her controlled style when dealing with something so intimate and ‘introspective’.

But science is not only a subject of this collection but its driving mode. Two of the most memorable and distinctive poems – ‘Miss Jenkins’ and ‘Raymond, at 60’ – use Copus’ own invention, the ‘specular form’, in which the second of two stanzas is a formal inversion of the first, where the last line of the first stanza becomes the first of the second. The poem ends where it began. It allows her to discuss subjects of memory and of lived experience, but within a characteristically controlled framework, refusing to be overwhelmed by the small but undeniable emotional traumas she takes as her theme. It is these scientific, and indeed technical, conceits of the best poems that prevent the IVF sequence from becoming too much. Nine of the eleven poems refuse the lyric ‘I’, suppressing personal pain even as phrases such as ‘weeping fig’ set the tone. 

This is not to say, however, that this collection is bleak and miserable: one of Copus’ non-events concerns a heron in a world without fish, there is a humour in ‘Ghost’, the ‘Polish embryologist’ looks ‘for all the world like one of the girls [/] serving on the bakery at Sainsbury’s’. But Copus is at her very best when dealing with loss. Love, in all its guises serves as a subject on which Copus can rhapsodise and it permits a melancholy self-reflection and introspection that is never less than scientific.