Modern life in verse

Julia Copus’s new collection The World’s Two Smallest Humans exists in four parts, each in their own way circling the theme of loss. Two parts – ‘The Particella of Franz Xaver Süssmayr’ and ‘Hero’ – take on historic themes, the first inhabiting that of a man in 1791 ‘translating direct from the silence’ of Mozart’s shorthand for The Magic Flute while also caring for Mozart’s wife, Constanze. The second channels history too, in this case an Ovidian past made new, rejigged for a few pages in contemporary idiom.

Both brief sections work well. But the collection really gets going in the two other larger sections – ‘Durable Features’ and ‘Ghost’ – where Copus’s lucid lines come into gripping focus. In ‘Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden’, the notion that ‘grief…will pass – ripen and wither’ is aired, and we see it again in ‘Impossible As It Seems’, as the speaker realizes that the ‘world is teeming / with similar gaps, backdrops / for lovers parting’.