The Drift
Alan Jenkins
Chatto £8.99, 64pp
Buy it at BOL

Alan Jenkins's fourth, and most interesting book to date, The Drift marks a further stage in the effort of this highly intelligent stylist to divest himself of the comforts of cleverness in order to come at his material more directly - to speak in the voice of feeling in a way which non-readers of poetry sometimes find lacking in contemporary poets.

The process (begun in his previous book, Harm) has a question behind it. When we reach 40 and are forced to grow up, how will the literary ideas and aspirations of our youth sustain us? By continual application, Jenkins suggests. Work is one of the "imperatives" to which the poet's self-knowledge commends him, as - in a book full of maritime metaphor - he tacks urgently to escape the doldrums of middle age.

It seems that work may have to be enough, taking the place of happiness and perhaps of marriage and children: a noble prospect, perhaps, but chilly too. In "Brighton Return" Jenkins aligns himself with the initially unlikely example of Larkin's "Dockery and Son": "For Dockery a son, for me nothing, / Nothing with all a son's harsh patronage". The poem compares Jenkins's biography with that of a friend who drew "the short straw" of early death but none the less made something of life by traditional means, ignoring "the pimps of literature" and the Grouchismo of the media in favour of unglamorous teaching and the satisfactions of family.

So, then, work it is. Baudelaire, one of the gods in Jenkins's firmament, likewise hoped that work might be salvation, and wrote: "I believe that I stake my destiny upon hours of uninterrupted work. All may be redeemed. There is still time." Mind you, look what happened to him. And there's a bind: the given work involves the contemplation of self and its sins, its family, its parents and contemporaries, so that the job, however well done, guarantees no escape from self-loathing or the sorrowful contemplation of a childhood which seems to have been simultaneously paradisal and purgatorial.

The element to which Jenkins commits his material is water - the Thames at Greenwich and the world's oceans beyond, "the all-absolving waters" in which deskbound fact and sea-going dreams can be wedded, at any rate for the duration of a poem.

The romanticism of this is far from simple, however. Jenkins recalls his time at naval school: "While my father sat downstairs and read Lord Jim/ I toiled at mysteries, dead reckoning, latitude/ and longitude; I buffed my shoes for starboard watch,/ saluted on parade and earned the two green stripes/ my mother sewed on my uniform. I was living out his hopes,/ although we both knew I would never go to sea."

In the family portrait that emerges, the poet seems to love his father but feel sorry for his mother - and momentarily worse than sorry in the opening poem, "Chopsticks", set in a restaurant during a trying meeting with her on the tenth anniversary of his father's death. He remembers the extended 50s of his childhood, in which Larkin meets up with Laforgue: "I'll sit and think of 10 years gone and her two cats gone, / gone with the Christmas dinners, my grandmother and great aunt, / with the endless Sunday mornings, Billy Cotton on the radio / and the endless Sunday lunches of roast beef, / gone with half her mind and all her teeth..."

On the book's other shore is the final guilty act of clearing the contents of his mother's house. Larkin doesn't seem to have written on this subject, but he might have done. Jenkins's reaction belongs with "late" Larkin such as "The Old Fools" and "Aubade", poems where the sustaining forces of sympathy and objectivity are routed by horror.

This book represents not simply a makeover but a process of considerable change - bravura self-mutilation turning to a recognition of the rights and dignities of lovers and friends, the verse lowering its youthful self-regard. It's a harsh schooling. If on balance The Drift is more interesting than successful (which has something to do with the residual formal influence of Paul Muldoon, a poet Jenkins admires but does not imaginatively resemble), Jenkins is none the less proving in the act of writing that he has the self-command and appetite for risk needed to see the business through in the long run.