This book is as handsomely produced as its subjects are in dire straits. For those who associate poetry with slim volumes, think again: this is the size of a smallish coffee table, and many of its tremendous photographs are presented over double-page spreads. PJ Harvey, recently awarded an MBE for her contribution to music, makes her debut as a poet in collaboration with photographer and film-maker Seamus Murphy, who created a dozen short films for her album Let England Shake. An enigmatic artist, Harvey now seeks to penetrate the mystery of others with Murphy’s help. Together they have travelled to Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington DC. There is no explanation given as to why this trio of places was chosen, beyond a quote in the accompanying publicity: “I wanted to smell the air, feel the soil and meet the people of the countries I was fascinated by.”

Unable to do similarly, we must make do with what PJ Harvey chooses to bring back. And while she strives for immediacy, the difficulty of what she has taken on is everywhere evident: most poems are scene-setting souvenirs, many are in the present tense, and together they read like an elusive journal: “An old woman stands/ in the middle of a track./ She holds two silver keys/ behind her back”. This is the opening of Zagorka, and the old woman is encountered outside a locked church in Kosovo: “We ask but she won’t let us in./ Both keys move into a fist.” The affront of the old woman refusing to unlock the church is returned to in a subsequent poem.

But not having a key, let alone the key, seems a good metaphor for the collection. Heartfelt and serious though this endeavour is, defeat is built into it. However sensitive an attempt to record moving experience, the poems are thin, a reminder that experiencing the profound is not the same as being able to communicate it. You cannot fly into lives less fortunate than your own and expect admittance. The Abandoned Village demonstrates the difficulty. It is full of poignant detail: the threadbare apron. But this is another poem about being locked out: the would-be telltale details tell no tales and the trees are speechless witnesses.

Poems inspired by Washington are more confident, although subjects still make themselves scarce. To the Oldest Homo Sapiens ends: “Voices behind me/ whisper in a language/ I don’t understand.” Endings fall flat, although I liked the particularity of the Kosovo poem about a railway station that finishes: “A thin line of daisies runs/ through a crack in platform one.” Elsewhere, rhyme is plonkily feeble. Of Charikar in Afghanistan: “There must be something in the air./ There is fighting everywhere.” I had hoped for more correspondence between the places investigated, and it might have been more successful had Murphy and Harvey dared to dovetail their efforts more, to allow eye and ear and heart to travel together.

Similarly, although Murphy’s photographs are arresting, they cry out for further commentary in words. Every picture tells a story, but sometimes a storyteller is needed. In Afghanistan, an amputee musician in spotless white, a busker, is startlingly pictured with a military man’s blurred portrait to the left of him. Would it be good to know more? Unequivocally, yes. Unanswered questions multiply. But at least Murphy’s eye unites one subject with the next. He is especially good at taking photographs of figures in a landscape overwhelmed by the vastness. I loved the extraordinary pictures of Afghanistan’s beautiful, hostile and seemingly endless horizons.

• The Hollow of the Hand is published by Bloomsbury in hardback (£45) and paperback (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £36 or £13.59

The Abandoned Village
by PJ Harvey

I thought I saw a young girl
between two pock-marked walls.

I looked for her in the white house
that crumbled mud from its falling roof.

On a nail in the kitchen
a threadbare apron.

The husk of a corn doll
hung from the ceiling.

I asked the doll what it had seen
I asked the doll what it had seen

I looked for the girl upstairs. Found
a comb, dried flowers, a ball of red wool

unravelling. A plum tree grew through the window,
on the window ledge a photograph

in black and white, but her mouth is missing,
perished and flaked to a white nothing.

I asked the tree what it had seen
I asked the tree what it had seen