Chris Tse’s (exuberant, glorious, poised, witty, wise) Dance-Floor Romance comes out this week, and I hope for it every success and well wish in the world. Tse has become one of our civic poets, making a space for his writing just to the side of the political and the demands of the moment and thus looking and listening in and on it in rewarding ways. It’s a role I never imagined for him as he set out (he’s a poet I don’t know personally at all, but I’ve bought each of his books as they’ve come out and have grown and changed as a reader under his tutelage), and one he’s made wonderfully his own. It’s a recognisable New Zealand and Bardic role (from Baxter in the 1960s to Wedde before the 1990s), but one now rightly different and distinct. It’s nice, this morning, reading Jackson McCarthy’s review (the book’s first?) and finding him responding to the _ourness _ of this mid-period Tse. Jackson hears the love chord sounding across Dance-Floor Romance as “a restatement of the lyric within the civic”. That seems right to me, and rightly put.

Mid-period Chris Tse puts me in mind of mid-period W.H. Auden. There’s a new relaxation and expansiveness, without ever loosening to slackness, complementing an earlier tension. There’s the sense of a public voice sounding itself in private places, and of private places being brought into public spaces. There’s a pleasurable delight in music and musicality, about the house and domestic without ever being fully domesticated and while staying knowingly unhoused. Tse is a poet aware of his place and of his responsibilities to place and to people, his head and mouth full of the noises and sounds and voices of his lands but prepared, on occasion, to talk back to them and to us. This collection, like Auden’s middle works, is comfortable in its own poetic skin and prepared to slip out of that skin when required. The verse is playful, toying, energetic, spry, sexy, winningly confident and charming and sly while also, like the rest of us, frightened, vulnerable, at risk. And it’s all………very gay.

There’s a pleasing sense across the collection of a poet aware of his skills and his craft and stretching himself out, trying a few new things, scratching some old itches and inhabiting a few different roles. There’s a tenderness and care on display (‘Please. Be here now.’) that was often kept fairly tightly constrained in the earlier collections. This is a collection of consolidation and expansion rather than a radical break or a new departure, but none the worse for that. The feeling of a deepened, more sophisticated, more rewarding and more extended encounter with interests Tse has had so far (ekphrasis, for instance, or engagement with pop music, or responses to other writers as interlocutors) make this a companion volume, and a companionable volume, to the post-How To Be Dead in a Year of Snakes Tse canon. Again, this brings Auden to mind: Tse is revising, reworking, developing sounds and images in a sound- and vision-world he has made his own, just as Auden’s great collections of the 1940s and 1950s peopled and populated (via opera rather than pop ballads, in his case) a fleshly, human, inhabitable gay world his earlier poems had longed for but never been able to wish into existence. I want to call the aesthetic on display here ‘tinkering’ without that term seeming belittling. Tse is in control of his inheritance: he is in the workshop, at play, busying himself with the tools to hand and knowing what to do with them. He is producing variations and, with each variation, a new pleasure and a new insight comes into view. Is it surrender or ecstasy? Yes, please.

This is clearly a collection by someone who has been Poet Laureate, without being burdened down by reading as a ‘Poet Laureate’s collection’. There’s an assurance to the voice, and (Auden again!) a nice and productive imbalance that comes in a few poems from speaking publicly in private (and privately in public), connected surely to the training and expectations of having functioned as a representative for Poetry across a few years. None of that should be mistaken for self-seriousness or absorption, but: when Tse steps in the room he can make the whole place shimmer.