This is the most personal collection Kate Tempest has ever written. It is her offstage, in-the-wings, behind-the-scenes book. Intimacy is its strength: the life could not be more private, the scrutiny of love, sex and sorrow will speak to anyone who has suffered a broken heart. Yet, at the same time, the overexposed quality of some of the poems is also its weakness. I sometimes felt voyeuristic as I read – as though witnessing more than I ought (while reminding myself that the decisions about what to include are Tempest’s own).

I wondered about the recklessness of this writing – a recklessness that seems to have grown out of vulnerability. To what extent can pain compromise poetic judgment? And why does the transition from private to public feel so uncomfortable here? It is as if some of these poems needed to spend more time on their own – in a diary, perhaps. More than one, such as Aftershowparty, in its last line, gives up, with a slippage in tone that reads like an eff off to poetry, a descent into plain – pained – speech:

Please find me here beside the stage, take me by the floating hands,
lead me to a private place and fuck my heavy brains out

Note the lack of a full stop (love not over until it is over). And yet, as always with Tempest, there is something arresting here too – the “floating” hands.

She describes the end of one relationship, the start of another, and divides the book, with satisfying simplicity, into three parts: the end, the middle, the beginning. I read forwards, then backwards – an experiment that confirmed she is right to see love as a sense of direction (the end of love might be about not knowing where you are going or how any poem will end). She acknowledges and resists love’s circularity: “You are not her / This is not then.”

If you have ever heard Tempest perform, you cannot unhear her voice when you read her poems on the page. The voice is unique – singsong, naive and knowing. In the opening poem, Awake All Night Thinking of You, there is a Keatsian La Belle Dame Sans Merci quality:

The day was gone. My spine was chalk
My mouth, unopened mail
I remembered walking home with you
And I grew pale.

The book is a miscellany of different forms: ballads, formal lyrics and fragments like broken china. Rhymes are often deliberately slapdash. One of the many pleasures of these poems is the encounter with words (like “floating” earlier), that are strange in context. In Firework, having described herself as damp timber that will not burn, she ends:

But every so often, with enough close attention
Our fire would roar with great authority
And light up the whole sorry place

“Authority” is unexpected. And authority, even at her most distraught, Tempest has in abundance.

Her titles sometimes read like afterthoughts, commentaries: I Was a Nightmare the Whole Time I Know It, is not alluded to in the poem itself but exists independently like an eye-catching browband.

She has no opportunity to tangle with the Romantic sublime – and London’s urban landscapes keep it real. On finding photographs you took of us observes people queueing to have their cats neutered and the collection’s finest poem, A Place That Meant Something to Me, describes Deptford as the remembered setting for an erotic encounter, the area now disconcertingly sanitised. It ends with the wonderful line: “Glass-fronted studios rear up like breakers.” This is a reminder of the poet Kate Tempest is – able, whenever she chooses, to soar above the conversational.

• Running Upon the Wires by Kate Tempest is published by Pan Macmillan (£9.99). To order a copy for £8.59, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Running Upon the Wires

Yes, we do repeat. Motifs
occur again, again

This does not mean
we are not new

You are not her.
This is not then.