Happiness by Jack Underwood review – death, depression and boiled eggs

Universal truths huddle among the asparagus in a poetry collection that delights in the domestic

In a short YouTube video made for the Poetry Society, Jack Underwood asks why anyone should care about poetry. He asks young poets (not that he is ancient himself – he was born in 1984, in Norwich) to imagine that “your poem is a complete stranger walking around a supermarket, tapping people on the shoulder, interrupting their day”.

He suggests that a poem involves its reader, be a “dialogue”. His reasonable implication is that you are going to need something pretty arresting to get the person in the supermarket to put down their shopping. Without a reader, a poem is nothing. That is what interests Underwood – and his first collection, Happiness, happily for him and us, has the generous quality he promotes: it is conversational, arresting, makes you want to respond.

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