There are no daffodils or pagans dancing in this week's poem, by Tom Raworth, but it bursts on the senses with a spring-like ferocity, closer to Stravinsky than Wordsworth. "Bubble" in line three is suggestive. Language here becomes a series of word-bubbles: some connect, some don't, but perhaps it doesn't matter. This is poetry as linguistic Big Bang, where word-forms are still being born, and are not yet oppressed by the need to bond in logical communities. Of course, this is illusory: the words are laden with histories, some of which coagulate (to steal an idea from the last line). But even as old denotations are recalled, the signifiers assert unusual independence. The title, Never Entered Mind, might be a clue.

So does the poem bypass the organisation of meaning? Not at all. It begins with a sentence, perfectly structured if surreal, and a syntactical framework is sustained throughout. Swiftly, in the second line, comes "introspection", a noun which deliberately introduces the idea of an entered mind. On an even cursory inspection, the poem conveys a minute orderliness of structure: it's arranged in couplets, usually trimeters, with three words per line until the last line, and an intriguing pattern of first-letters, predominantly F, M, A and G, M, I. Sometimes the ground seems all bubbling "fermentation" and sometimes it's solid, the couplets behaving like the reassuringly neat pathways they're not. Raworth might be playing a series of jokes on the reader. His poem is no more pinned down than a symmetrically-patterned rug laid out on a seethe of bubbles. But it keeps the mind afloat.

The primitive pleasure of asking literal questions about a poem's meaning, and coming up with interpretations, needn't be sacrificed. What, for instance, does "forgotten monkey amber" mean to you, gentle mind-reader? Perhaps you think of Flying Monkey Amber Ale, a can of which you'd forgotten at the back of the fridge? Good beer, in modest quantity, can certainly delight one's introspection. But perhaps the combination of monkey and amber summons a less happy association, with elephant and ivory, whale and ambergris? I don't think either of these is an interpretation, let alone an explanation, simply a couple of many possibilities that skim the mind, almost too far away to be seen.

Ultimately, perhaps, bleaker associations prevail. The third stanza calls up the ugly lexicon of the Vietnam War. It reminds us that line three wasn't entirely – or perhaps wasn't even slightly – about bubbles. "Bubble massive armour" was the phrase (a trio of nouns, giving the verb "fix" a possibility of nine subjects). Swelling, blistering war-wounds may be implied. Bubbles burst, and so does armour. In line six a disconcerting stutter, suggesting a frightened voice or even gunfire, occurs in the repeated "a" sound where the line- and stanza- break violently intrude: "mitochondria a … " Then there's the sinister "germ mail" (line nine), suggesting not only "spam" but biological warfare, and, in 11 and 12 respectively, references to "incandescence" and "flames", the latter alluding to the collection's title. This "Rite of Spring" is vibrant with slaughter as with re-birth.

In the last line, "coagulability" belongs to the same lexicon as "mitochondria" and even the more informal "germ". It's a word that brilliantly possesses its line, and almost seals the poem in place, rather teasingly, if "illicit" is the qualifying adjective. One of the illicit pleasures of reading (and possibly writing?) an experimental poem is to defy its liquidity, to make it cohere, and then to watch it melt (like a "martini ice-cream"?) and flow again. A montage is not a message. And it's important not to over-interpret a montage, although not to interpret it, at least piecemeal, would be an unachievable perfection.

Never Entered Mind is from Windmlls in Flames: Old and New Poems, a miscellany which includes some fine earlier pieces that escaped inclusion in the 2003 Collected Poems, reviewed here. While I've no wish to damn it with the word "accessible", the newer volume could prove an attractive introduction to this important late-modernist poet. Raworth's trenchant intelligence, while sometimes didactic, makes room for metaphysical wit and earthy humour. For a flavour of the entire collection, Jeremy Noel-Tod's New Statesman review captures some of the vitality and variety.

Never Entered Mind

forgotten monkey amber
delights my introspection

but bubble massive armour
fermentation magnet arc

geek motherfucker instinct
fix mitochondria a

generous martini ice-cream
further messages arrive

germ mail illustrated
flashes medical alert

gone mental incandescence
flames melodically around

glitz mercury illicit
coagulability