Throughout this outstanding collection, there is the sense of an elsewhere, at once tantalizingly close and unreachable. The opening poem, 'Glitch,' describes a fall and the unshakable sense that follows, 'of being wanted somewhere else.' It recalls Emily Dickinson’s line: 'Life is over there–Behind the shelf…' Yet Dickinson’s lonely oddity could not be more different from Laird’s family scene ... Laird is formidably accomplished—his poems range from free verse to villanelle (further exploring freedom and limitation through form)—and is keenly aware that language is only as good or bad as people make it ... Several poems are one better than still lives—they function as animated lives ... But the greatest joy of reading this unmissable collection is Laird’s peripheral vision as a poet: the deer seen from a suburban train; the unplanned signature on a windowsill in deep red dust; the many glimpses of elsewhere.

...haunted by an uneasy attitude toward selfhood ... Feel Freeattempts to gaze unflinchingly...wondering what it means to live a life when a single, knowable self simply won’t hold still ... it seems vital that poetry continue to inquire into twenty-first century selfhood, even in the absence of satisfying conclusions ... That Laird’s poetry does this modestly, even in self-deprecation, does not diminish the courage of the act. If Feel Free does not disabuse too thoroughly readers’ own comforting notions, there is momentary refuge to be found in its wry lucidities — that rare and particular solace of camaraderie borne by good, honest mental company ... If something like 'transcendence' is folded within these pages, it is in these moments where, fraught with doubt as the human experience is, something shines through.

The quarrel in this book is between the language-loving poet for whom one phrase deliquesces into another and the more hard-bitten and judicious figure of 'Autocomplete,' who holds language to account, who wants an ethical warrant for his aesthetic skill. That ethical prerogative is there in poems on the besetting public horrors of Laird’s immediate environments, Grenfell in London, the residue of war in Northern Ireland, race in America and the refugee crisis: these subjects might be said to call for the blunter, more direct treatment they receive. But the highlights of the book are love poems and city poems for the Information Age: the poet’s situations and relationships—as a father, a son, a husband—are sized up and filtered through different kinds of brilliantly manipulated language, often tuned to a distinctive acoustic, an assonance that depends on short vowel sounds ... Feel Free, Laird’s best book yet, features other less flamboyant but equally good poems, including an affecting sequence for his mother, 'The Folding,' and hard, gem-like lyrics, 'Watermelon Seed' and 'Glitch,' and 'La Méditeranée,' which shows his gift for finding original images[.]

Americans invented business English and confessional poetry; doing business in the UK is an entirely different thing, and confession there is a chump’s game. Reading Nick Laird...one is always aware that [his] speakers are arguing, persuading, bargaining, carrot-dangling, sleight-of-handing, and losing gallantly ... Laird, having spent some years in the service of a mode of language that smothers any hint of human emotion or subjectivity, can’t resist toying with it in the medium that’s supposed to be all about human emotion and subjectivity ... Subverting the false order of a hyperautomated society, even by violence, becomes a kind of fantasy—and this from an Irishman who has written about real sectarian violence in his childhood ... What’s so animating about Laird is that he is able to hold this idea in his head—that survivors of trauma must speak about their experiences—and simultaneously to believe, as he told The Guardian in an interview in 2005, 'Poetry is fiction as well. It’s like a psychodrama—a walk through someone else.'

In Feel Free...Nick Laird’s fourth collection, the Northern Irish poet, novelist and former lawyer finds himself entering the heartland of middle age. It’s bittersweet for the writer but rewarding for the reader, as Laird considers the reality of having a child young enough to be bottle-fed and parents old enough to die ... There is a satisfying masculinity to the collection, be it a male perspective of a traditionally female act—such as feeding a baby—or the boyish humor seen in certain wordplay ... Some poems take a cheerfully apathetic look at middle age—such as 'The Cartoons and Team Me'—and others are wholly romantic. 'In the midst of our lifelike life/I come to this fork in your hand,' begins 'La Méditerranée,' while 'Incantation' borrows lines from Frank O’Hara and Kurt Vonnegut to make something particularly beautiful.

These various attitudes toward the possibilities of language play out in interesting, often powerful ways throughout the poems ... [Laird] is one of that post-Seamus Heaney generation of writers who use the language and landscape of Northern Ireland but who look to a much larger international audience. They are a group of poets distinguished by the seriousness with which they practice their art, a seriousness that allows—as Nick Laird shows us in Feel Free—a range of emotions that can include even laughter.

The book abounds, and perhaps over-abounds, with the sort of witty self-chastisement that has become customary for this poet ... In To the Woman at the United Airlines Check-in Desk at Newark, at which we assume he has behaved intemperately, he writes of 'Shonique' and her 'fluorescent orange lipsticked lip' which 'curls up at me with such distaste' that he feels obliged 'to sit / down now on my case at the rush of shame I feel: // and also love; and of course lust, hate, remorse'. This is a gutsy portrayal of power and guilt, but the emotions are too abstract, sweeping, unconvincing ... Some of the best poems are the most ostensibly simple, though, such as “Silk Cut”, about a grown-up son and his lonely father ... Laird is in control of his craft, whether in tight free verse or the self-referential form of a pantoum. He can be repetitive, though: there are lots of what seem to be versions of the same poem, about the obligations of fatherhood, for example. But even in those poems that don’t add up to much...there is usually something pitch-perfect enough to make you glad.