If nature is a haunted house, then art, or so Emily Dickinson remarked, is a house that yearns to be haunted. Few better contemporary examples could be found of the truth of this adage than John Burnside's latest collection, which is a tour de force of liminal expression. The following captures the essence of his style and vision:
 the barred owl calls from the well of my mind,
more echo than thought, as it fades through the wind
and flickers away to the silence beyond
like the voice, in myself, of another.
His poetry is best when dwelling in possibility, the imagination having been skilfully persuaded, by rhythm and by image, to postpone making up its mind indefinitely.

As for the many "other" voices that Burnside is happy to welcome as his own, none it seems is more fruitfully present than that of Edward Thomas, the incomparable master of gentle equivocation in the name of fidelity to truth. Through such trafficking with his poetic elders, Burnside is able to provide his consciously "belated" poetry with the patina of mystery and to supply his psyche with the vocabulary needed to articulate its own elusive ancientness: "Before the songs I sang there were the songs / they came from, patent shreds / of Babel, and the secret / Nineveh of back rooms in the dark."

A wandering, unappeasable spirit walks restlessly abroad in many of these lines, registering uncanny presences and absences wherever it goes: "no body, no warmth, no aftermath, no prize". Burnside is therefore naturally attracted to the motif of the mysterious hunt, which provides the armature for his long opening poem "The Fair Search", a kind of rite of passage for his troubled, and troubling, imagination. By its end the quarry may have been killed, but it is never found or identified: no act or relationship or experience is ever conclusively named in this endlessly suggestible poetry whose signature style is as ultimately indecipherable as "an inkwash of blear in the grass / like the fogged stain after a thaw". But for all his preference for what another of his masters, Wallace Stevens, called "the beauty of inflections" and "the beauty of innuendoes", Burnside is not a wispily ethereal poet. A stretch of country crossed during the hunt is captured in oils, not in thin watercolours:
snowdrifts, then sand,
blotted and kissed with yew-dupes
and windfall holly,
spotted owls hunting for beetles along the hedge,
smoke in the distance, nether roads,
passing bells.
He is at his best when thus able to embody the insubstantial.

Where he seems to me not to be quite so successful is when he succumbs to the attractions of the "noir"  a Stevens phrase suggestive of Burnside's interest in the macabre, the morbid and the groteseque. This is the predominant mode of the section of poems collectively entitled "Black Cat Bone", which opens with a reminiscence of a bleak and bloody childbirth and climaxes with a poem, reminiscent of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, about an obsessive's gruesome act of murder: "It wasn't personal; I only saw/ the logic in the moment of my bidding". Melodramatic in tone, the concluding lines of this Grand Guignol sequence strike the false note that has kept intruding throughout: "And I wake, in the cage of my bones, / on the same cold ground."

A safer muse than Poe for Burnside is Pieter Brueghel, from whom he learns the lesson, crucial for his poetry, of "how we journey in the world / Slithering as we go, the foolish and the wise". And it is when contemplating his Winter Landscape with Bird Trap, 1565 (above), a scene of communal activity actually composed of a myriad enigmatic individual actions, that Burnside is moved to voice a tentatively affirmative thought, "hazarding a guess that someone else / is close beside him, other to his other". It is this shy glimpse of a provisional, conditional, but precious togetherness that is then consolidated movingly in several powerful poems in this collection's final pages. It is captured beautifully at the end of "The Soul as Thought Experiment", "where you cannot help but think // of kinship, at that point where snow begins / on some black road you thought was yours alone, / made bright and universal, while you listen". And it turns poignantly luminous in the lines with which the whole volume ends:
but this is the time of year
when nothing to see
gives way to the hare in flight, the enormous
beauty of it stark against the mud
and thawglass on the track, before
it darts away, across the open fields

and leaves me dumbstruck, ready to be persuaded.
It is a steadying final vision whose serenity has, we are convinced, been hard won over the tortuous and testing route followed by Burnside in this engrossing collection that ends, appropriately, not with settled conviction but with a readiness to be persuaded.

M Wynn Thomas's In the Shadow of the Pulpit is published by University of Wales Press.