Serious, comic, brave, cowardly, engaged, disengaged, urgent, unurgent, chattering chiffchaff, talking horses, unpretentious, pretentious, all of God’s creatures are here. There’s also an almost – but not quite – dialogue between the poems and the laconic (and sometimes furious) musings of the passages which punctuate them. There are a series of fairytale poems, and others which give unfettered voice to Marcie, a character who has appeared in Mark Waldron's previous books. Behind the humour and playfulness, there is always something deeply unmeant, meant.

Sometimes metaphysical, sometimes apparently confessional, sometimes challenging, often hilarious, Mark Waldron's poems take you by the arm and usher you in to a dark/light, funny/sad, silly/serious world which is exactly what the actual world looks like if you creep up on it and take it by surprise. As human beings living in society we're supposed to keep what we really think hidden, but the poems of Sweet, like Rinky-Dink want to look at the absurdity behind our posturing, because in looking at it squarely in the face we might hope to have some freedom from it. Sweet, like Rinky-Dink is Mark Waldron's fourth collection, following Meanwhile, Trees (2016), published by Bloodaxe, The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both from Salt.

These poems may sometimes pretend they're joking but they never really are. And what is it they're not joking about? Death for one thing, and the fact that we don't actually know who we are, and the fact that we don't truly know who our loved ones are, or what art is, or anything else for that matter. Sometimes it feels as though someone has run off with meaning. It's no longer to be found where we could once expect to find it, perhaps in religion or in nature or in art, and these poems set off in search of it. Their aim is to see if there's a way of looking and a way of using language that can bring some meaning back to the world, because without it, we're lost. Meanwhile, Trees is Mark Waldron's third collection, following The Brand New Dark (2008) and The Itchy Sea (2011), both published by Salt.

The Itchy Sea is an extraordinarily vivid collection of poems which are, above all, entertaining. The poems each have a kind of freshness and cut-through that will hold the reader's attention in a world that's full of dazzling distractions. They are a protest against the well-founded idea that poetry has to be dull. Their concerns are sex, death, the soul and a chocolate car. Beneath their shiny surfaces they are an intense but carefree therapy session for all our infantile ids.

POETRY BANK CHOICE. Mark Waldron's debut collection The Brand New Dark is a book about sex, eyes, eggs, dogs, death and sausages. It is a book concerned with our loss of faith in language, a book about our place in the world, about sex and love and a pair of puppets called Dougal and Florence. This surreal, absurd and entertaining collection mixes the formal with the colloquial, the tragic and the comic, the intensely personal and the comically detached, in a style which is startlingly original without being obscure. Funny, dark, disconcerting and moving, often all at the same time, the poems are refreshingly direct, spoken in a way that seems to implicate the reader in their situations and discomfiting stories. The Brand New Dark is above all an entertaining collection of accessible poems. A book for all the people who don't like poetry as well as for the people who do.