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📂 **Category**: Poetry,Books,Culture
💡 **What You’ll Learn**:
Afterburn by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry 11 years later with a masterclass in lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that there is nothing beneath poetic deliberation. Its themes range from social and political justice to reflections on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences that pay tribute to the writer’s sister. The interwoven specificity and episodic nature of the poems is captivating: one senses their movement, “in the body, / in his memory / and in words,” breaking away from control and purpose. “I can still fall in love.” It is clear that this poet still loves life.
Into the Hush by Arthur Sze (Penguin, £12.99)
This first UK publication offers readers the current American poet laureate’s bold vision of the world’s fragility: a vision of persistent iridescence and brilliance, even in the face of environmental devastation and devastation. While the title suggests a phonetic organization, it may be more appropriate to understand the poems as pictorial brushstrokes. “When you work/worked so long, your art is no longer art/but a stick that awakens your eyes to what is.” The one-line stanzas that taper into dashes are repeated, illustrating the silence in which Sze feels the disappearance of the world and the body: “You loved, you hated, you fantasized, you despaired, and the fleeing colors of existence rushed through your body—.” Even in its constantly renewed beauty, the collection feels strange, as if these poems were a final attempt to bring order to the chaos of life. “What is yours at this dawn?” one asks. Maybe nothing, because “when lines converge, lines diverge.”
‘Insecure’ by Karen McCarthy Woolf (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
“This is how you learn to survive – / sunlight streaming / through the branches – / all little girls must stay / alert.” McCarthy-Wolf’s taut new book reflects the appearance of perfection and the opacity of erasure. Alongside the poems, which meditate broadly on the capitalist vulnerability of bodies and landscapes, are images of exploded doll heads, metal and shattered borders, and surveillance cameras mounted on palm trees. “How do we claim / nothingness / that is space?” Photography, maybe. Poetry, certainly – although the collection also contains essayistic explorations of tattoos: “I began to think that tattoos were a way of taking back power over the body…” Juliana Spar encouraged poets to pay attention to the bulldozer as well as the beautiful bird; McCarthy and Wolfe extend this environmental ethic to the human and the architectural in this sparse, hypnotic collection.
‘Just Sing’ by John Berryman, edited by Shane McRae (Faber, £12.99)
Baby, wake up – 152 new dream songs have just been released! Readers who encounter Berryman through Only Sing are not confronted with poems that were not good enough to make the first stanza in his sixties classic; Instead, they will discover a fierce vernacular poetics, a precise sonicism, and an awareness unwilling to separate the demotic from the highly conceptual. “Let’s think of its nature as a kind of fog.” The “he” here is Henry, the hero of Dream Songs, a prejudiced, neurotic white American man who completely resists classification, detached from the particularities of the situation. Berryman is a master of the line, and like no other poet he produces a page with shifting technical tectonics that can shock or shake, often both: “Drinking and singing seem to be all that our fate imposes upon us, / We sleep and make love now and then, till we die, / And what does our fate commit us to then?” A treasure trove for Berryman fanatics and new readers alike.
Illuminating the Hares by Simon Madril (out-Speaking, £11.99)
Loss and Honesty ranks Maddrell’s first collection. The speakers frantically recall the desires that often accompany the opposite of shame: “How its soft branches advance and warts develop / Here I speak again of shame.” While themes include memory, life with HIV, and the transformation of innocence, the language is steeped in the poetics of intersectionality, observed with a richly descriptive eye: “Polaroids of people gone, their faces anew for posterity, / Cheeks covered in white powder, dust marks of death on my pants.” The reward for a lifetime is wisdom – “The captive lives longer than the wild” – and the moments here silence the reader and move them to contemplation.
Dream Latitudes by Aliya Kobusko (Faber, £12.99)
“Often, I felt like I was / on the verge of feeling / great,” declares one of the 11 poems titled “X.” Letter x? Roman numeral? Or have the titles been cut off? Nearing a climax that never arrives, Dream Latitudes is a strange beginning – as strange as waking up in a “handful of light” in the afternoon. Kobusko’s poems are songs full of chance, changing the timbre of their music, sometimes line by line. “There is nothing but sleep. There is nothing but sleep. How can we exhaust the inexhaustible?” Fields, dreams, songs, birds, green, light, horses, pain – a poet can save these words from cliché if, like Kobuszko, he “deconstructs” them into haunting music that neither seduces nor alienates. “Tell me you can hear me when I say / In the fields of our dreams I’ll find you.” This set breaks a lot of rules, and it’s all the better for it.
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