[In the following review, Greening compliments the underlying theme of “survival” found in the poems in From the Neanderthal.]

From the Neanderthal marks the return to verse of Adam Thorpe, best known as the author of Ulverton and two other novels. His poems patrol frontiers and thresholds in time, scanning the past through powerful lenses, sharing irrational fears, keeping their distance from real danger. In “The Exchange”, his daughter's concern at a wayside crucifix (“Why that man, he fall / in the water?”) is undermined by the father's amusement at her misunderstanding (“Well why they hung him up to dry, then?”); elsewhere, he sees a hot-air balloon's “tongue of fire” and is convinced it is ablaze; and in an extended poem about a rocky childhood landscape, even the lichen is “barely clinging to the world”.

“Ghosts” is the most memorable of all these border pieces, perhaps because Thorpe is here successfully reining in his novelist's skills and not wearing the heavy Anglo-Saxon boots of, for example, “Picking”. Thorpe loves Ted Hughes, but his natural style is a more “serviceable lightness”, nicely balancing monosyllables on the metre, while juggling alliterations:

If what slipped on their flesh was our hands
scrabbling for the heart's impatience,
its pluck, pounding our palms upon a drum
that did not sound, then do not blame us
who hold the taste of their death in our mouths …

The “secret narrative” in “Ghosts” is of an attempt to resuscitate two drowned swimmers on a beach. Elegiac lyricism, haunting landscape, a refusal to give redundant biographical detail, yet the feeling of genuine experience: a masterly poem.

At a time when regional assemblies are making the English feel unsure of themselves, Thorpe returns to the popular English sources, to Rufus and Cnut, those royal meeting-places of myth and history: the stone at the heart of the forest, the figure on the sea's edge. Ironically, Thorpe himself lives in France, though perhaps this enables him to avoid mere nostalgia; as in the multilayered Ulverton, Thorpe's sense of England is not only deep and historical but coolly contemporary. “New Arrival” begins with Edward Thomas—“The announcements mangle the names / of nineteenth century villages: Streatham, Norwood, Bermondsey”—but turns to compare the entire scene to something out of Tarkovsky, concluding banally: “We live in a world / of ladders and paint-splashed foot-stools”. (A “Whitsun Weddings” for our time, perhaps.) The poem is essentially optimistic—a journey to London's museums, a newborn niece—or at least it believes in survival. But what it most terribly evokes is “Cousin Ruth, my age; / at five, on a journey, she slapped some seats / like these, full of BR dust and something // strange that turned her blind and simple”.

The question of extinction hangs like a cloud of that unmentionable, poisonous substance over the entire collection—a fossil embedded in the seats at the Nuremberg stadium puts a brief decade of atrocity in perspective, and “Twitchers” even sees God as a barmy bird-watcher, keeping an eye out for those best fitted to go in his notebook. The one image on the book's cover is of a single flint: “remember and survive!” it seems to say. But the shifting, feckless voices from the dream-like Neanderthals in the long final sequence are fated to die out. We find ourselves here in a territory somewhere between Hughes's wodwo-land and that of Golding's Inheritors, where “no people have yet been born this year” and the first bird to be spotted is already extinct. Thorpe uses syntax and line breaks to keep us guessing, and to make us feel that “Something is always ushering us”.