A reviewer sent another book by Alexander McCall Smith may find himself at a loss. Well, this one does. What can he find to say that he hasn’t said before?

Reviewers receiving a new novel by PG Wodehouse must have found themselves in the same sort of boat. There’s a good deal of variety in McCall Smith’s settings; yet the tone is always the same. Likewise Wodehouse might move from Shropshire to Hollywood by way of the Drones Club and the golf course where the Oldest Member held court, but it was all “the mixture as before”, and this was good news to the reader, even if making for hard work for the reviewer.

McCall Smith is one of the most popular – “best loved” as publishers have surely said on some dust covers – of writers today. This is as it should be, but, when you think of it, you may think it surprising, even odd.

Alexander McCall Smith. PIC: Jayne Wright/JPIMedia

There is no angst or despair in his writing, no anger, no self-pity, no rebellion, no gore in his crime novels, no mean streets, no urban squalor; he’s a bestseller free from self-pity. He is more likely to invite the reader to a tea-party than an orgy.

You might be tempted – if you are oppressed by the world – to toss his book away in irritation. And yet of course you shouldn’t. He is fully aware of the dark side of life, but will not surrender to it, believing in love, friendship, kindness.

The poems in this new collection, buttressed by brief commentaries, range widely. When he writes about death, it is with acceptance and awareness of how we best say goodbye; “The proper language of farewell/ Is spoken quietly, and with regret,/ Makes no claims to what it cannot/ Possibly deliver – gives no promises;/ And yet good-bye, which is a word/ Whose meaning we often learn too late,/ Still leaves us well provided for;/ Your smile is sunshine on the hills,/ Your laughter is the chuckle/ Of a burn; your kindness is the way/ The earth continues to provide/ Ripening grain and pendent fruit,/ Things you’ve left behind, have given us.” There is a Horatian note struck here, and often elsewhere.

There are surprises here, for instance poems about the Cambridge spies: Philby, Blunt, Burgess and Maclean, the Philby one beginning: “Not particularly loved by a father/ Who preferred Beirut and its society/ To the early bedtime of England.” There is no approval of the spies – that would have been a surprise – but there is understanding.

McCall Smith once, he tells us, “started to write a libretto for an opera about Anthony Blunt. It didn’t get very far”, but he has preserved what he wrote and here gives us an aria which was to have been sung by Margaret Thatcher. “She would have had a contralto voice in the opera, without a doubt,” he writes. A pity the work wasn’t finished and staged: “it ended up sounding a bit Gilbert and Sullivan-ish.”

There are three “Love Letters to Edinburgh”. McCall Smith, thanks to his Scotland Street serials and his Isabel Dalhousie novels is, of course, known as a novelist of Edinburgh, one who loves the city.

Indeed he is so firmly identified as one of the voices of Edinburgh today that one thinks of him as a native of the city, and it is surprising to remember that he was born and spent his boyhood in what is now Zimbabwe, but there are poems here also about Italy, Greece, Sweden and Finland. So one should think of him as a poet of Edinburgh and the world.

McCall Smith has spoken of Auden as his favourite 20th century poet, and there are echoes of Auden in this collection, the conversational, unbuttoned Auden of his later years rather than the dazzling show-off of the Thirties when he made his name.

Poetry, according to the mature Auden, makes nothing happen, and I suppose this is true. Nevertheless it gives pleasure and may provide consolation. Both are on offer here. There are also charming illustrations by Iain McIntosh.

I Think Of You & Other Poems, by Alexander McCall Smith, Polygon, 164pp, £12.99

Book review: I Think Of You & Other Poems, by Alexander McCall Smith