Julia Copus’s poems are acts of resistance. The material tests its own boundaries to become something new. She is not limited to – or by – personal experience. One of the many pleasures of this phenomenal collection, her first for seven years, is that you cannot predict the varied ways in which these poems will fly. There are autobiographical pieces, poems of history and imagination and, in The Great Unburned, there are witches overhead: “Slow at first, over fields and fences, / over the god-fearing steeples we’ll climb, our broomsticks / tight in the grip of our shameless, fantastical thighs.” It is a poem of formidable skill (that “fantastical” perversely and satisfyingly makes the witches real) and written in the hinged form Copus invented (she dubbed it the “specular”). The second half of the poem mirrors the first, and yet the doubling back is not straightforward – the punctuation changes and you lose some italics. You never enter the same poem/ river/ flight path twice.

The specular is a fitting form for Copus, who is obsessed (as in her last collection, The World’s Two Smallest Humans) with looking back and seeing differently. How do you think about time in which a lover was unmet, a baby unborn – time that was nonetheless filled with its own future? Poetry can play the games with time that life forbids. In Any Ordinary Morning, in memory of Adolf Büker, she writes: “I think of him now, the morning you left for war./ Your new young wife beside you doesn’t know yet how the story goes.” And because Copus knows how the story goes, a charged present fuses with an oblivious past. In So Long – the title’s double meaning carrying itself effortlessly – she looks back to her father’s childhood, before “the bloom and wither/ of a marriage too soon overblown”. She ushers in his future only to dismiss it, but knows it survives within the poem. In Creation Myth, she describes the countdown to meeting (one assumes) her future husband: “But in the unknowable meanwhile/ the sunlit length of garden where we’d meet (how/ far from then forethought of) had shrunk to a year/ away already – just a year! – its warm, brick walls; then it was/ weeks only, days…” This was a time that did not know what it was anticipating but now seems defined by it. In Stories, the beautiful poem with which the collection concludes, the past’s continuity with the present offers consolation. And I love the “yellow pistils of the irises” – the single focus that centres the rest.

Copus’s autobiographical poems are as richly detailed as novels, with roaring trains (and, sometimes, people) and an outdated phone “the colour of Milkybars” with her stepfather-to-be on the end of the line. (She has it in for phones: another phone, in a different poem, is “poised on its haunches. Black Bakelite fear.”) I was moved by The Week of Magical Thinking, about a dog’s last days, and how a fragment of willow pattern china stirs wild hope: “Without a future, I thought, there’d be no need of a bridge.”

The collection’s outstanding second half is an exploration of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s meetings with Marguerite Pantaine, who attempted to murder the actor Huguette Duflos. It is an anguished sequence. Lacan’s patriarchal interventions, his blind spots in the service of sight, alternate with Marguerite’s tacit mutinies. It ends with How to Eat an Ortolan, in which Lacan consumes a tiny bird. No metaphorical explanation needed, but the poem is as small and perfectly formed as the feast.

• Girlhood by Julia Copus is published by Faber (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Stories

after Marie Howe

Think of a night in midsummer, a night with water
falling to a pond from the raised mouth

of a freckled stone seal, & children up late
calling to each other two or three gardens away, & under

those a softer murmur. So lies the past,
no further. You do not need to get up

& stand on tiptoe at the hedge to know
that what you hear are the people you love. You suppose

the stories I’ve told are over. Think of the garden.
You sat there so long the dew had settled

on the grass, on the yellow pistils of the irises, the children’s hair.
Their laughter was made of the same

air that moved as a breeze across you, & the dew likewise
was bits of sky, nestling where it could, & all of it

(although you could not touch it)
was part of you, was what the summer night contained.