It's a while since I've reviewed any poetry. Reading Ian Wedde's sinewy, emblematic new collection reaffirmed for me the problem of using the linear, continuous medium of prose to discuss the oblique, spatially-and temporally-liberated language of poetry. It also reafirmed how good the guy is.

The Little Ache has its genesis in Wedde's trip to Germany seven years back, as he began finding and building people and places for his sumptuously-patterned 2020 novel, The Reed Warbler. If you've had the good fortune to read that, you'll recognise names, events, locations repeated with variations in these poems.

While he “stalked the family ghosts of German ancestors and obscure relatives,” Wedde discovered a seminal writer in the Hamburg dialect. He found also a zealous supporter of the Paris Commune uprising; half-details of great-great-great-etc rellies.

Summarising a top poet is a bit like trying to cage clouds but here goes. There are 76 pieces, which it's best to read as a sequence but which you can dip around in satisfyingly. Some are just four – five lines; some ten times as long. There's an appendix of explanatory notes, which, like Eliot's on The Waste Land, open gates into more reading.

The sections measure and meditate on a journey which starts at Berlin's Tegel Airport, and ends near Raurimu Cemetery, where the author had planned to plant a chestnut from his German odyssey, but “instead plant in myself the memory /.....the ghost / of the chestnut tree / through which I watched the seasons pass / during which words also came and went / and were sometimes remembered.” Great finish.

On the way, you meet a friend of Brahms, a pigeon called Werther, a pedantic librarian you'll want to smack, the great-grandmother officially recorded under “Usual occupation, profession or job – Widow,” a windcheater showing the severed head of John the Baptist. (As often with Wedde, the delights include the details).

Settings are both specific and universal: “York Terrace, Blenheim....the organic shop around the corner.... the nearby Moabit Prison Memorial ....the King Country boondocks.” References range from demotic to erudite as you skim among registers: Pussy Riot, Liebniz, The Chills, “the eighteen-year-old upstart Friedrich Nietzsche”, punk singer Poly Styrene (sic: look her up).

There are motifs of dislocation and dispossession, lost songs and stories, past voices and visions, one of them “daintily eating slices of melon with cheese.” Places and partners are chosen; “Something may be imminent / something else ending.” It's all part of “the familiar dialectic / between quotidian and terror.”

Writers who've been on the job for a while develop a voice you can recognise within half-a-dozen lines. They also know what to leave out and how to take risks with what's left in. In these pages, you feel part of a private, privileged conversation, a courteous, frank yet reserved series of disclosures and confidences. You're a participant, a friend rather than a spectator.

It's precise, meticulous language, gliding from German to English, stepping confidently between academic and colloquial. It affirms the understandings “which happen / because we have books / and which are not forgotten.” By the end, “(e)verything that was thick and complex / is becoming thin and familiar.” Or maybe it's the other way round; Wedde suggests but doesn't solve. It's an album and a singing whakapapa, a journey where you travel hopefully and feel the satisfaction of arriving.

This year marks half a century since Ian Wedde's first book. He'll be appalled if I call him a quiet achiever, but I'm going to, anyway. I look forward to his next 50 years.

Reviewed by David Hill

David Hill's two new books for Young Adults, Coast Watcher and Three Scoops, will be launched at New Plymouth's Puke Ariki in August.