Look no further than the dustjacket for the first poem in Nick Laird’s latest collection Go Giants. On the inside of the front cover, the poet launches into a defence of his craft, addressed to poetry itself: ‘Poetry, they’re pretty sure you’re not worth knowing, / fit for nothing, broken’. Laird’s apologia reads, initially, as an impassioned release, internal rhyme driving us forwards, the poet indignant in his enumeration of the arguments in the case for the prosecution. He draws on a contemporary idiom of computer software and reality TV while portraying the attitude which sees poetry as inaccessible or irrelevant, ‘a piece of plastic / crap or encrypted chat’—‘they want you put to a phone-in vote ... I don’t’.

The ellipsis, and the understatement of this line’s conclusion, speak for the poem as a whole. For all its pent-up energy, it is not, ultimately, a bulldozing riposte to those who dismiss poetry. Rather, it is writing that shows as well as tells. This is a poem that reminds us, in startling simple terms, that poetry can be the quiet antidote - in the form of linguistic exactitude and sustained attention - to all that technological clamour. ‘[W]hat / you offer’, Laird writes of his art, ‘is a juncture of the two kinds of real, / the act caught in the act’.

Go Giants is Laird’s third collection. He won the Quiller-Couch Award for creative writing during his time in Cambridge, and his subsequent work in poetry has received critical acclaim, including the Somerset Maugham Award for his second collection On Purpose (2007). Now firmly in his maturity, Laird’s scope is admirable, moving in Go Giants from the vast and weighty to the intimately personal. ‘The Mark’ is a highlight. It takes as its stimulus a statue of Marsyas in Rome’s Capitoline Museum. In Greek mythology, Marsyas was flayed by Apollo for daring to challenge the god to a lyre contest. Laird is, for a moment, our tour guide, noting that the statue’s face, with its ‘dread expression’, was used by Renaissance painters as a template for crucifixion scenes. What follows, however, is far from guidebook fare. It is a provocative thought expressed with striking economy: the Renaissance painters forgot that ‘Christ sides with Apollo, / with all good sons of fractious gods / intent on implementing father’s will’.

Elsewhere, the same simplicity of expression remains, but the tone becomes one of gentle humour. In ‘Observance’ for example: ‘There is no catchword that I know / for the opposite of war, / a battle-cry // to herald only central heating / and four / triangles of buttered toast’. And ‘Talking in Kitchens’, a beautifully crafted love sonnet, concludes with a couplet that riffs on the age-old trope of writing as memorialisation: ‘Here it is written down if I forget to say it - / my home is the temple made by your hands’.

The collection ends with a long poem called ‘Progress’ which incorporates chapter titles from John Bunyan’s seventeenth century Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress. In unrhymed tercets redolent of Heaney, reflections on the Northern Ireland of Laird’s youth - a search of the past - are woven into astronomy’s search of the universe. At times playful, at others violent, the poem’s sudden shifts in tone are frequently unnerving and always witty. This is never more the case than when discussing the recurring figure of Galileo who, ‘plotting the trajectories // of four nomadic specks near Jupiter / procured proof of a nature indisputable / That Not Everything Revolves Around You’