Andrew Martin’s poetry is highly charged emotionally, but in this, his third collection, it never feels heavy, or encumbered with sentimentality.

The desire paths of the title are the rivers, tributaries, trails and flight-paths of the natural world, but also, the footpaths, remembered streets, mind-loops, smoketrails, lifelines, lines on skin, fingerprints, veins of a human life. All are infused with desire and capable, like maps, of being read. Sometimes these lines become blocked - paths overgrown, veins silted-up, even air can be “thick as water / streamed between us” (walking with you) - but the poetry flows continuously, spilling over into fertile deltas of emotional depth.

Martin sees desire everywhere he cares to look, and he looks everywhere, at everything, with the focus and precision of a Leica. Desire is woven into his world and its effects – “there is always a river / whittling away somewhere” (sometimes you forget). Desire is in the skylark which “chimes the sky” (tigered); in the “train lines” which “sing / the miles between us” (sometimes the world is so gentle); in “a field / roaring / with dandelions” (the path); in “the bleached bone grass / beneath us” (amongst the dreaming and the dead).

Desire connects everything.

In perhaps the most representative poem of the collection, desire threads, it is “your smoke stitched / into my dark air” which captures both the elusivity and mystery within that peculiar atmosphere we know as love; it is found in the lines that swallows and swifts scratch “into the palms of wind”; it is heard in the threads of silence that weave counterpoint through the poet’s songs of love.

Elsewhere, desire is unearthed in “the silk of the circuitry // scribed into the sky / that separates / us” (the silk circuitry). Throughout, it is “stitched”, “threaded”, “etched” into both natural phenomena and experience. Sometimes it wounds, as in the lines of experience “scored into … skin” (if I could give you); sometimes it heals or acts as a balm as when, with “the waves / we walk into // each step / blunts our blades / shatters our rage” (sea glass).

Skin, both the thick and thin kind, is a recurrent motif: skin as the canvas on which experience is etched, skin which protects, but which bruises and scars; which heals, but which can also “seal” in pain. Fingertips, likewise appear throughout: feeling, tapping, searching; they are Martin’s sensitive indentifiers, helping the poet to find his way through emotional darkness.

These metaphors are woven in such fine needlepoint you barely notice them, but the cumulative effect is exhilarating. There is great yearning here, trauma and pain, but it is never allowed to become maudlin. Feelings of loss, longing, sorrow, fear and anguish all take flight through a stunning technique which eschews punctuation in favour of space and light: the space and light of the page itself – the margins, line and stanza breaks - which is drawn into the poetry. This is seen most clearly in the closing Phantom Paths which runs across several pages of sparse verse, often just two or three lines of stark, cold beauty standing isolate in white space, like ghosts, or traces of memory. This is emotion stripped naked and exposed to the elements: “wind licks the wounds / it gave itself”, or, “let the river unravel us / back to threads”, or, “sky shivered / deep space distorted”. And finally, the aching, sadness-in-hope and gentle wordplay of, “our silver song / sung soft / as newborn soles”

There is also, it must be said, uninhibited joy in, and celebration of, the natural world, its compensations, and the animals, especially birds, which inhabit it.

This is poetry in a minor key, of great heart and unwavering honesty, delivered in a quiet, confident voice, which doesn’t demand, so much as seduce attention. The rewards for submitting are great indeed.