Stealing the Mona Lisa

There is a characteristic lightness of touch and a restless comic energy to Chris Greenhalgh’s first book. Inner and outer worlds combine in poems that crackle with satire, yet are lyrically affirmative and highly charged. He handles material at an ironic distance and in steady close-up, exploring both personal experience and the wider, weirder world of the media with vivid imagery and narrative excitement. For a first collection, the range is impressive, from a sensuous sequence of love poems to a debunking of the Apollo moonlandings and the culture of the free-market. Elsewhere, the desert and the shopping arcade are brought together, and the book features a large cast of diverse characters, ranging from Marilyn Monroe, an Elvis impersonator, and the trumpet player on the Titanic, to a religious cult-leader, the Royal Family and the Pope. The poems successfully domesticate American and European models, yet they enjoy a sensibility all of their own: beneath the playful mood and glittering surface, there frequently exists a sour, unsettling subtext and intimations of a darker tone.