Transatlantic communication, Adam Chiles' Bluff

Adam Chiles’ second full collection, Bluff (Measure Press, 2024), is one of the most thought-provoking books to emerge this year. Its interest is two-fold. On the one hand, there’s its intrinsic poetic quality. And on the other hand, there’s the unique implicit dialogue that it establishes between the U.K. and U.S. poetry scenes.

Let’s start with this latter issue. Chiles was originally from the U.K. and now lives in the U,S.. His first collection was published by Cinnamon Press in the U.K. back in 2008, but most of his recent magazine and journal credits seem to be Stateside, while this book has also been brought out under the auspices of an American publisher. However, the vast majority of his current subject matter revolves around his previous life in the U.K.. And then all the spelling is Americanised, though the turns of phrase are inherently and quintessentially British.

What’s more, Chiles might be publishing in the U.S., but his aesthetic refuses to plump for either side of the American binary polarity between formal and free verse. Instead, he adopts the more British approach of playing with both methods, often fusing them within a single poem. As such, Bluff offers an excellent bridge across the Atlantic, a reminder that what unites us is far stronger than what separates us. It sets out to include both nationalities and achieves its aims, dodging false polemics, which brings us neatly on to the poems themselves.

There are direct allusions to both Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin in this book, and both are present in the background via Chiles’ portrayal of humans in the natural world, paired with his fierce clarity of language, as in the following extract from ‘Self-Portrait as a Lighthouse’…

…You inhabit the verges

of this song, neck-deep
amid the salt-scrim,

a pummeled scar,
storm-wrecked, sheer

above the Atlantic’s steel
horizon. Each night,

mind ablaze, you plow
the gale’s blind acre…

And then there are terrific, pared-back poems of grief for the poet’s father, which run throughout the collection, again interwoven with the nature The opening lines of ‘Reading Edward Thomas to My Father’ provide an excellent example of Chiles’ technique…

From the ninth-floor hospital window, acres broaden,
scroll out past slate and pylon, the black moor

unfastening, hour by hour, its thicket of wounds…

Bluff is a collection that repays repeated readings. Its ability to generate empathy in the reader, to find the universal in the specific, are eternal values that are often eschewed in contemporary poetry, but Adam Chiles is a master of them. It seems clear that he’s gaining a considerable readership in the U.S., and it’s time a U.K. audience discovered or rediscovered him too. His poems are a breath of fresh air.