Norman Silver’s new poetry collection purports to speak with a variety of voices; what it lacks is one unifying voice. “I am an intelligent machine. ”” I am small as a puppet but with no strings”. “I loathe the hideous little Irk.” There is nothing egoistical about this “I”, self-awareness is what it does not have; found anonymous in charge of a poem.

The trouble seems to be that in seeking to celebrate the common experience, Silver has lost sight of the one vivid impression that makes it uncommon to each individual that shares it. One poem in particular, “Snapshots”, lists over two pages a series of such impressions: “The globe thistle is a world just becoming . . . The sunis a distress flare to passing galaxies . . . The pylon in the distance . . . is the skeleton of a giraffe” Severally, each could be the electric spark that ignites whole stanzas; lumped together they look uncomfortably like a school exercise, written up on the board to inspire the class to its own efforts.

Among the copy-book stuff the true poems shine with real insight; the unspoken misery of accumulated guilt in “Night Terrors”: “I’ve forgotten how to sleep.It used to come naturallywhen I curled up into a ball of innocent dreams,But now night is a bully.” And “Good Mother Lizard”, on the discovery of a dinosaur’s fossilised nest, containing fossilised baby saurians, “waiting for Mother to feed them”.

It’s a good-hearted book, full of sympathy and ruefulness, concerned with the every-day, and the perceived preoccupations of modern children, but the title says it all. Ears full of Walkman, eyes full of television, hands full of Sega and Gameboy are not lightly seduced by words on a page. In the end, you wish that the poet had been a little less worried about his possible classroom audience and a little more indulgent of himself as a writer addressing people who read.