The Brink
by Jacob Polley
320pp, Picador, £7.99

Jacob Polley's first collection draws intense attention to the edge of things, that point where land becomes sea, north south, interior exterior and, most of all, the moment when the ordinary is recast as the miraculous. He delights in a kind of pared down metamorphosis, in taking an everyday event - cooking, going to the cinema, moving house - and, through sleight of image or colloquial phrase, trying to throw our complacency and assumptions to one side. His writing aspires to the tradition of George Herbert or Henry Vaughan, the kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent.

And sometimes his own work approaches this. Take "A Jar of Honey", one of the most successful pieces here. The poem is full of a restrained, almost puritan sensuality, relishing, at the same time as it underplays, its capacity to transform. Here's the first stanza:

 "You hold it like a lit bulb,

 a pound of light,

 and swivel the stunned glow

 around the fat glass sides..."

The otherness of the honey is evoked, significantly, by comparison with two everyday objects - a lit bulb and a pound of, let's say, sugar. Herbert or Vaughan would bring in the everyday, the colloquial, to make concrete a religious experience ("I saw eternity the other night") whereas Polley calls upon the ordinary to recast the ordinary. It is a kind of secular transubstantiation. That word "stunned" knowingly carries the effect of those first two lines. In the second and final stanza the process continues:

 "it's the sun, all flesh and no bones

 but for the floating knuckle

 of honeycomb

 attesting to the nature of the struggle."

The metamorphosis of honey into sun lets in a whole range of religious echoes but Polley undercuts this immediately with another everyday metaphor, the punch of that "floating knuckle". There is aggression and danger, a physical bluntness running throughout and this builds to the slightly contentious final line ("attesting to the nature of the struggle"). As in many of the poems in this collection, Polley tries to end with a language that hints at greater breadths and perspectives. The sense of "the nature of the struggle" and the struggle of nature have already been achieved and this line is perhaps a little needless. But its use is interesting in the context of the book as a whole.

The act of creation, of writing, is continually perceived as a struggle in itself, something that takes place against the odds in a pared down, difficult, even malevolent context. Polley was born in 1975 and part of the interest of this book is to watch a young poet trying to break away from those writers who have inspired him. Heaney, Hughes and at times Muldoon and Lowell are all strong presences in this volume and time and again we see Polley attempting to find a way of articulating his own experience and background through their example.

Take the poem "Smoke": the piece is a description of the domestic ritual of his father lighting an old stove: "My father kept a stove / with dogs legs / on a pink hearthstone". From the start it evokes Heaney's "Follower": "My father worked with a horse-plough / His shoulders globed like a full sail..." Both pieces are about the process of articulating and trying to break free from influence and both pieces end by drawing out the symbolic implications of their descriptions. Heaney, perhaps rather melodramatically, transforms the father from the followed to the follower; Polley attempts something more complex and ambitious. The image of a bird burnt in the flue of the stove becomes a metaphor for the young poet waiting to be born.

Once again Polley's sense of the miraculous is imbued with violence and danger - the act of creation is a struggle, a risky and difficult venture. But, although it reaches beyond the poem that inspired it, "Smoke" is, in the end, nowhere near as achieved as Heaney's "Follower". It feels slightly clumsy and leaden, it doesn't have the ease and adeptness of the latter. In this, as in several poems, Polley hasn't been able to transcend his literary models.

The Brink is by no means a first collection that changes the poetic landscape; it doesn't have the range, impact and facility say of Hughes's The Hawk in the Rain, Heaney's Death of a Naturalist or Armitage's Zoom - those writers Polley is seeking to define himself through and against. But there is a certain cutback virtue throughout, a belief in a restrained language and the transforming possibilities of description and metaphor. To end, here is an excellent, almost apocalyptic portrayal of the communal wonderment of cinema that suggests the struggle can indeed be worthwhile:

 "then sneak a look at the rows behind

 as the curtains skate apart and strangers

 catch the brightness of this idea

 full in the face, their mouths blown open

 and eyes given up..."

· Charles Bainbridge works at the Poetry Library on London's South Bank.