🚀 Check out this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian 📖
📂 Category: Poetry,Best books of the year,Books,Culture,Simon Armitage,Seamus Heaney,Best books
✅ Here’s what you’ll learn:
MAll of 2025’s most popular groups were powered by a spirit of unbridled experimentation, pushing the boundaries of what could be considered “poetry.” Sarah Hesketh’s 2016 book (CB Editions) is a great example: it requires 12 interviews with a variety of anonymous individuals about the events of that year and presents parts of the texts as prose poems. The cumulative effect of these votes is haunting and full of pathos, as they “vote for anyone, and their lives remain exactly the same.”
Luke Kennard and Nick Makoha also boldly remix the source material and inspirations. The former’s latest collection, The Book of Jonah (Picador), takes the young prophet from the Bible to the world of arts conventions, where he is constantly reminded that his ubiquitous presence is mostly pointless. Makoha’s The New Carthaginians (Penguin) turns Jean-Michel Basquiat’s idea of exploded collage into a poetic device. The result? “The visible / made itself known through the invisible.”
Leo Boix’s Southern sonnets (Chatto & Windus) are more commonly celebrated as they weave explorations of his native Latin America with reflections on same-sex marriage. The mix is stunning throughout, the images simple but vivid; Boix is a modern master at using the sonnet to illuminate “each passing day, the hidden thread that binds us together.”
Two books won the Forward Prize for Best Collection this year, the first time the award has given two winners. Karen Soule’s book Well Water (Picador) not only denounces environmental catastrophes, but also looks at the underlying economics that got us to this point. Its tone is refreshing and provides comfort only through its clarity: “Under the dark night sky on earth/No explanation is coming.” Another winner is Avidya Written by Vidyan Ravinthiran (Bloodaxe), it is based on the poet’s travels to northern Sri Lanka, where his family is from, and his move to the United States. As travel poems, they put me in mind of the times of James Fenton, while Raventhiran’s immersion in the English canon means linguistic delights throughout – ‘a river, crowded with errors, doubtful…lied, / Faithful, beloved’.
The messy goodness of Isabel Buffy (Faber), an anatomy of a toxic marriage that’s both funny and clever, stood alone as the best of the Forward Prize’s first collection. With lines like “I think the devil would have swallowed me / If I didn’t have all this ass,” these are poems that fully know their power and revel in it. Karen Downes-Barton’s debut Minx (Chatto & Windus) was similarly riveting, detailing the poet’s time in the care system, and the wider discrimination she experienced coming from an Anglo-Roman background. Her use of the gypsy language in her poems adds an unexpected joy to the often dreary content.
The most important anthology of the year was Nature Matters (Faber), edited by Mona Archie and Karen McCarthy Wolfe. By showcasing nature poetry by poets of color, they both radically redefined what the subject could contain and placed the political dimension of the environment front and center. Meanwhile, Seamus Heaney’s poems arrive Faber was a reminder that his importance remains high, 12 years after his death. By bringing together many previously uncollected poems, this book will provide riches for years to come.
This has been a busy year for poet laureate Simon Armitage. New Cemetery uses fast-flowing trios to contemplate death, while Dwell (both Faber) is the opposite, an exhilarating testament to how animals continue to thrive in a human-dominated world. It was a very welcome return. Gillian Allant’s tenth collection, Lode (Bloodaxe), plays with time and memory in works that are prayer-like in their intimacy and simplicity, while in Foretokens (Chatto and Windus) Sarah Howe brings a powerful anger to her always elegant poems, giving them an unexpected ferocity.
One group above all others has stayed with me this year. Richard Scott’s second book, That Broke Into Shining Crystals (Faber), is stunning in how it deals with the toughest topics, trauma and its aftermath, and finding the beauty within. While a bold remix of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” would be achievement enough, the ecstatic poems inspired by a variety of still lifes are some of the best examples of the technique I’ve ever read, linking pain and painting in ways that fascinate me: “There’s so much mischief evident in these blue petals. And always the corolla of the flower like a schoolboy’s face.” They represent one of the bravest and most amazing groups of this or any year.
💬 Tell us your thoughts in comments!
#️⃣ #poetry #books #hair
