The 9 best new poetry books to read for National Poetry Day 2021
National Poetry Day is celebrated in the UK every year on the first Thursday in October, and bills itself as an annual mass celebration 'that encourages all to enjoy, discover and share' their favourite works.
And, if you too are looking to get involved this year, the latest poetry book releases really do have a lot to offer.
Whether it's works about gender, motives, or inheritance that you are after, here, we have rounded up the best of 2021 so far to help you choose the perfect read for you.
C+nto & Othered Poems by Joelle Taylor ★★★★☆
There are several reasons why readers may be tempted to dismiss this book unread. Those not put off by the title – which puns on the poetic canto and that other word you’re thinking of – might understandably give up mid-way through the preface, when the author starts listing “the six words that summarise me”. (These include “fist” and “lemniscate”.) Others, skimming the back cover blurb, might leap to the conclusion that a book about the butch subculture of London lesbian bars in the 1990s is Not For Them. If they do, they’re missing out on a real treat.
Like Richard Scott’s Soho, C+nto commemorates an underground history, but is uneasy about such acts of commemoration, “now that/ pimps have blue plaques” and “Old Compton Street/ is a museum”. Joelle Taylor imagines glass display cases filling Soho’s streets, “fishbowl cenotaphs” appearing “wherever we once loved”, displaying to tourists bottled moments from the area’s sometimes violent history: “a brawl ribbons in still life./ an explosion in aspic./ a terrine of a night”.
This tour ends with “a snow globe mounted/ on a pedestal// inside, Maryville, blinking/ all of her wonders, captured,// the wind nailed to the wall.” When we step inside, and through the doors of her imaginary, archetypal gay bar Maryville, the book leaps up a gear. Maryville is not just a bar. This “hunched building with its hands in its pockets” is a refuge, a place where butch women (“bois”, as Taylor calls them) become themselves. “The woman pushes open the door & enters her own body.” Inside the bar, “Music is playing. It is the sound of being listened to.” That last line comes from one of several first-rate prose poems in the form of scenes from a film script, complete with sound and light effect cues.
When we move further from Maryville, C+nto falters. A long poem about anti-gay purges in Chechnya struggles to find imagery to do justice to its subject (giving us instead “a rainbow slumped in a gilded cage”), while Taylor’s inclination for wordplay leads to an awkward yoking of social media and state-sanctioned death (“I will be screen shot/ before I am shot”).
But in the vivid bar-set poems, Taylor brings a close-knit community to life. We meet four Maryville regulars, each at once an individual and a representative type. “Tweed understands the idea/ of her”, Taylor writes of buttoned-up Dudizile, whose wardrobe fills with “the curled tongues/ of ties at rest”. There’s also street-fighting Angel; biker Valentine, “her mouth an exhaust/ pipe we press our lips/ to”; and salty old Jack Catch, like “something the sea placed on the end of your bed”, who “has been in the corner of the bar/ for so long the locals pray/ beneath her”. The poems focusing on each – and ultimately drawing them together, when thugs invade the bar – are the strongest parts of the book.
Maryville’s “bois” may present a united front against the mob, but Taylor raises the question of whether that co-operative spirit can survive our fractious social media age, when “the ghost of conversation stands staring at a lit screen”. Taylor doesn’t reject the lit screen entirely: the book ends with a pair of QR codes, which smartphone-users can scan to watch videos of her performing the poems.
A little unfairly, critics tend to ignore any performance poet whose name isn’t McNish or Tempest. It’s true that some poetry emerging from the competitive “slam” scene – in which Taylor is a former UK champion – relies too heavily on the same small repertoire of first-person rhetorical devices. (Taylor falls back on them here, in a very slam-ish closing poem called Trauma: The Opera.) But it is also a scene that can produce meaty, inventive, powerfully moving work – and C+nto is proof. TFS
C+nto & Othered Poems is published by The Westbourne Press at ￡10.99
Rotten Days in Late Summer by Ralf Webb ★★★★☆
“I seem to spend my life missing you,” wrote Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop. By then, they’d been close for 20 years; he’d already told her, a decade before, that not proposing to her was “the one towering change, the other life that might have been had”. Bishop was a lesbian, and it would never have worked, but Lowell knew that: his life drew its energies from dwelling in loss.
I thought this while reading Rotten Days in Late Summer, Ralf Webb’s debut collection. It’s a sensuous group of poems: there are seven “love stories” for different addressees, and two longer pieces, “Diagnostics” (on bereavement) and “Treetops” (on a mental collapse). Love is the motor, loss is the end. One partner is eclipsed by another; a man sickens with cancer and dies; a self that was balanced begins to fragment. This is all recollected in patient sadness, the richest kind of tranquillity.
The bulk of the poems, neither “love stories” nor long, are efficient at painting the scene. It’s the West Country in the 2000s – Webb is 30 years old – a working-class landscape of “fly-tipped scrap heaps”, “pebbledash bungalows” and violent homophobia. The memories emerge like crystal: at a rural car-crash, a body “drapes/ out of the windscreen like a rubber prop”, a bystander emerges in “nicotined overalls”, and soon enough “Sirens doppler sluggish down the lanes”. In this poem, “Crash”, the backdrop comes to seize our attention, a plot “between the derelict inn and valve factory”. The poem ends: “A waste, really. Everyone says its soil’s good for growing.” Those voices are far from callous; written back into life from the future, they testify to the difficulty of forgetting your roots.
The “love stories” are carefully poised: not too gushing, not too precise. That’s audible in the rhythm; the lines strain towards bursting, but never do:
[…] I was rudderless,
Convincing you of things I couldn’t believe
Myself: “Wanted to say, just wanted
You to know, I’ll lose this baby-fat eventually.
Slow down, I promise, we’ve time.”
It wasn’t obvious when it began to disappear.
Half-asleep one night, I started,
Realising it was no longer there.
I can’t tell whether this poem, “Love Story: Lies”, is looking back at what followed a break-up, or remembering when the flaws first came to show. Either way, “rudderless” is just the right word, quietly perfect for where it sits; you could say the same, in “Love Story: The Back Pages” –
One day ten years ago I was laying my head
On your chest, in the stupid meadow,
Actually chewing grass…
– of the words “stupid” and “actually”. These words are small doors into past emotion, all laced with slight incredulity, a clue to the sad fascination that all those difficult moments, or people, still hold.
There are other readings of Webb’s poetry – its ardent queerness, its environmental motifs. That this verse is skilful is clearer the more closely you read, but it’s an understated technique. Rarely do these poems seem like performances – which is a skill, since they’re poems, so they are. (When they do, it’s because they’re a shade overwrought: “emotional illiteracy” is called “the great British investment”; “a little wad of pain” rolls “like a cue ball” under a bed.)
You begin to think: “you can take the boy out of the West Country…” (and so on), or maybe the land wants its poet back. At one after-school party, a girl dreams of fleeing to a commune in France – “Wherever in France, she specified, then whitied”. Beside her are “bowls of spoiled fruit, whited with mould”: her environment already mirrors her, as if reminding these kids where they belonged. However toxic that environment seems now, it’s ingrained in its children’s bones: Rotten Days in Late Summer might be disgusted by this idea, but – as is true of any disgust – it’s secretly convinced by it too.
The poems aren’t cathartic at all. Their beauty – whatever Webb himself wants – often lies in willing ignorance of what they’re going to achieve. They just remember, which is brave, if unavoidably sad. “Every so often,” Lowell told Bishop, “I have a vague acute feeling of missing something or someone, and it’s you.” He was being precise: he knew that “missing” could mean many things. CRC
Rotten Days in Late Summer is published by Penguin at ￡9.99
Dead Reckoning by Jude Nutter ★★★★☆
Let’s start with the fish. As you might guess from the title, “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins, Berlin, 2011” is not a poem about fish. Filling eight pages of Jude Nutter’s fourth collection Dead Reckoning, it is a poem about desire, about innocence and experience, how “every time/ we lie down to assuage our loneliness,/ we find the flesh already there,/ waiting”. And as of June – having ploughed through more than a hundred collections published since January – it is the best new poem I’ve read this year.
In “Disco Jesus…”, we find the insomniac poet half-watching TV, “flicking through the god channels” in a Berlin hotel room, while her mind revisits the scenes of her early sexual experiences: a Youth Club disco, a hot summer working on a farm. In a bed across the hall from her sleeps “a man/ whose body becomes, during sex,/ one long wound”.
So where are the fish? In a tank in the hotel, just garnish to the scene. Another writer wouldn’t have put them in – this teeming poem is full enough already. But Nutter does, and through her gaze they are made wondrous: they “weave/ their Mobius strip through the wet fire/ of the only world they know”. Pages later those neon tetras catch her eye again, and become another symbol of life trapped by desire, when a “single tetra forms perfect/ circles on the water simply by drifting/ to the surface and kissing what imprisons it”.
Nutter’s poetry is like this: it lingers on incidental details with delicious accuracy. The 23 poems of Dead Reckoning are at once languorous and urgent. They flood and sprawl. “Still Life with Hand Grenades and Tulips” begins with a waitress gesturing to the Somme battlefields. It takes her five lines to speak five words.
I have family, she says, flailing
her arm in an arc, shunting the vambrace of bangles
on her lean suntanned forearm
towards a dry, metallic music and taking in
the whole of Picardy, out there.
When an arm points, Nutter watches the arm, not where it’s pointing.
That contrast – the living body in the foreground, the silent dead somewhere beyond – is at the heart of the book. One poem shows us the poet as a young girl playing in the house in Germany where she grew up, a house that was once part of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In another poem, she watches oblivious lovers strolling hand-in-hand through its grounds.
Not all the dead are so distant. Four poems called “Ianua” (meaning threshold) are elegies for her father; three others mourn her mother. Her dying mother’s hand shivers like the “Pale flag/ of an overrun country”. Nutter has a rare gift for visual metaphor – she throws them out like penny-sweets, almost always in the same formulation (“the [x] of [y]”), a syntactic tic that would become frustratingly repetitive, if it weren't for the freshness of the metaphors themselves. At times, Nutter's exuberant visual imagination sits oddly with the emotion of the scene, as when, in passing, she compares her father’s coffin to a “silk-frilled mollusc”.
Nutter’s elegies are affecting, but the best poems here are about the living body, looking back to a time “when the mind, housed/ like the seed of a berry in the flesh/ and oblivious to the flesh,/ had not yet invented the body as a problem”. The title poem is an almost pastoral childhood memory of making a collage from a discarded porn mag, found “beneath a shifting/ helm of bird and leaf fret”. Nutter combines sexual nostalgia with closely observed nature writing in a way that recalls Fiona Benson and Sean Hewitt. Like those writers, she strives for a kind of quietly traditional lyric beauty. This can occasionally lead her to become too self-consciously poetic in her diction (I’d be happy never to see “liminal” in another poem). But Nutter is generally self-aware enough to avoid that trap, and saved from solipsism by her 20/20 peripheral vision, her keen attentiveness to the margins of the scene.
For instance, the marvellous “Fossil Hunting at John Lennon Airport” begins with a close-up of a fossil (“sliced so cleanly/ open, exposing the dark/ undulations of the septa, like curtains”), before panning out to reveal it's embedded in the floor of the ladies' loos on Level One: “I am thinking/ about harm and vulnerability when the door/ to the stall next to mine bursts open...” She might pretend she wants to focus on fossils, but can't help eavesdropping on a phone-call happening in another cubicle – and the poem is better for it.
Though her books have so far been published only in France and Ireland, the Yorkshire-born Nutter deserves a wider audience in this country. Immersed in the pleasure and pain of life, she writes with “a fluent, blunt hunger for the world”. TFS
Dead Reckoning is published by Salmon Poetry at ￡11
The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette by Angela Gardner ★★★★☆
“Part the Third: in which we contemplate the aftermath of a shipwreck and a most ghastly murder.” If those words don’t make your heart leap, I can’t help you.
Drawing on sailors’ songs and historic records, Angela Gardner has created a verse play for voices (in Dylan Thomas’s phrase) based on a true tale of cannibalism on the high seas. This shaggy sea-dog story is set in 1884, but feels a perfect fit for 2021, with shanties invading the pop charts and Thomas’s Under Milk Wood enjoying a sell-out run at the National.
We meet penniless young Richard Parker at home in Itchin Ferry, Hampshire, a “thin shingle foreshore […] rotting with Bailiff’s rent, ragwort/ in pence, adding up to mere tidal shillings.” (Gardner is good at this kind of chewy scene-setting; elsewhere she gives us “Wayside weeds, their scent/ a ragged bewilderment”.)
In a call-and-response poem, Parker bids farewell to his cousin Sarah (who is, as it happens, the author’s great-great-grandmother) and sets off to become cabin boy for the doomed Mignonette. This rickety 52-foot yacht is being delivered from England to its new owner in Australia, a spoilt playboy called Jack Want, whose motto “Jack wants what Jack wants” becomes an eerie, italicised refrain.
Gardner’s use of voice is slippery throughout; lines are pinched from contemporary ballads and earlier sources, including an account of a shipwreck from 1625. Her characters’ words sound like folk songs or official documents just as often as they resemble speech, while a few curious poems read like a cut-up phrasebook of nautical flag signals: “We are not able/ If we are able/ Are you able?”
The vocabulary is preserved in 19th-century brine (there’s plenty of “douse your mizzen/ double-reef your mainsail”), but the syntax is fresh – particularly in a few short, titled poems which interrupt the main script. The best of them, “My Mignonette”, turns into a gorgeous, almost incomprehensible tumult. Punctuation and grammar come unmoored in a Gerard Manley Hopkins-ish ecstasy that feels at once Victorian and avant-garde:
Lifting foam to the ! water !
and her pull on, thrusting
upon bright-work. I, she, resistance
: such spring of (old rails)
her line aswish delight.
[...] Streamlined every towards her silk
scantling water to a delight
prow you
Those lines made me want (as the poem puts it) to “tell the Oh! Beauty oh!” The style elsewhere is far plainer – more credible as dialogue, but at times lacking flavour. When Parker, considering “how a shark could/ rip our limbs from our body”, says “we feared his powerful jaws”, it feels a little like stating the obvious.
Despite one character’s winking promise of “a Lurid tale”, Gardner resists ironising her subject matter. This all-but-forgotten story is given respect and space (perhaps a little too much space; there’s the odd lull in its 148 pages) because Gardner wants to make us care – and she succeeds, sometimes through inventive use of the page itself.
For example, with the yacht wrecked and the survivors becalmed in a tiny lifeboat, one character breaks the silence, and is comforted. In its context, this brief exchange becomes profoundly moving, partly because of Gardner’s use of space – two lines drift halfway down an otherwise blank page, alone on a wide, wide sea:
BOY I am afraid
NED I am here
For all the visual impact of such moments, I suspect that – much like Under Milk Wood – this poetic drama would sing more clearly on the air than on the page. An enterprising radio producer should pitch an adaptation to the BBC at once. If Radio 3 don’t bite, feed ‘em to the sharks. TFS
The Sorry Tale of the Mignonette is published by Shearsman at ￡12.95
Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard ★★★★★
Cyndi Lauper, Pop Chips, vodka; snatches of sitcoms and YouTube clips; someone is passing you a cigarette. House parties are reassembled clichés, pastiches of all the parties that went before. Everyone’s nervily playing a role; nothing can ever feel natural. When you realise this – that parties resemble unrehearsed plays – you understand Luke Kennard’s game.
Each of the 154 “prose poems” in his new book, Notes on the Sonnets, takes place at a party (maybe several parties). And each of the 154 departs from a Shakespearean sonnet, though they muss the old order up: while the riffs on Sonnets 53 to 65 are in sequence, the book starts at 66 – “Tired with all these, for restful death I cry” – and ends, having hit the limit too early, at 122. Still, as Kennard, a university lecturer, knows, some order is just convention. Shakespeare’s sonnets bear no individual dates; their arrangement may have been their writer’s, or an editor’s, or no arrangement at all.
Neither sequence – Shakespeare’s nor Kennard’s – is telling a single story, so neither moves straightforwardly. But that’s how anecdotes go: we remake them per time and place. At Kennard’s party, nothing’s quite real, nor is it surreal, more a woozy interplay of the two. An elderly man makes Old Fashioneds in silence; the DJ plays “the complete works of Bob Dylan edited down to just the harmonica parts”. The place resembles a stage:
“How you behave at a party is actually the most important thing, because a good party is always lit like a therapist’s practice or a backstage area. Sometimes you’re going to think, what am I going to say, what on earth am I going to say?”
No one stops saying things. At one point, the speaker makes a rum-driven speech, but the partygoers sob and sob. At others, he drifts into a ghoulish reverie. There’s a “happy horse” and a “sad horse”, who clop in and out of the text. The latter says, interrupting a moment, “nobody comes to ruin except by me” – a clownish Christ, but also a horse, its nose through the balustrade.
And there’s a “you”, to which these prose poems, like the pop hits from which they steal lines, are usually addressed. Notes on the Sonnets is romantic like that. But a poem is never merely a love-note, and – again, as is true of Shakespeare’s “dark lady” or “fair youth” – there’s no evidence that “you” exist, or are one. There may be several loves in this house; they may be inventions on the fly. (Besides, people in love are always dreaming each other up. That’s the kind of deep truth you would learn at a party.) Shakespearean echoes can be heard throughout, such as the ghosts of terminal rhyme, which signalled Shakespeare’s departure from the vogueish Petrarchan form. Take the end of the Note to no. 25, “Let those who are in favour with their stars”:
“Something that never existed in the first place cannot be estranged. Better to marry than to burn, but both can be arranged.”
Such a flourish is never far away, but before the work sounds cheesy, Kennard tamps it down with something wry:
“There should be more of you, the world should never be without you, I mean that more than anything I’ve ever said, dear god has someone spiked this?”
The lines self-efface with a smile.
Jumping from one room to another, a hallucinatory scene to a drunken bore, Kennard’s book is good-humouredly wild. It reminded me of John Berryman, whose self-joshing Dream Songs, and their own Shakespearean vibes, any poetry fan in their cups might quote. That’s another habit of characters in Notes on the Sonnets – reeling off what they hope are bon mots – and Berryman’s sequence, too, if it is one, plays tricks with linear time. Its hyper-emotionalism could be an act, or just sincerity. You don’t know what you’re listening for, in restless poetries such as these, and may not expect it when it comes. I often thought of Mika Gellman, a poet who wrote one astonishing book called jack in 2013, then seems to have vanished into the Brooklyn air.
And of other things, and other times. A note is provisional, like the memory it records, so its evanescence is personal. Reading a work such as Notes on the Sonnets, you’ll form your own associations, and then they’ll burgeon or fade or swerve. Good stories outlive many tellings. Kennard’s book, this endless party talk, is as riddling and enjoyable as the old sonnets on which it riffs. Think of it as the ideal cabaret: it never coheres, it never wants to, and it’ll never leave you at a loss for fun. CRC
Notes on the Sonnets is published by Penned in the Margins at ￡9.99
The Telegraph's Poem of the Week column appears every Thursday in our Culture Newsletter. Recent weeks have featured poems by Lisa Luxx, Charlotte Mew and Safiya Sinclair. Sign up for free at telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter
A Blood Condition by Kayo Chingonyi ★★★★★
The title of Kayo Chingonyi’s Dylan Thomas Prize-winning first collection, Kumukanda, referred to a rite of passage undertaken by boys of Zambia’s Luvale tribe before they become men. For Chingonyi, who moved to the UK from Zambia in 1993, aged six, Kumukanda approximated his own ritual “in the absence of my original culture”. While that book’s lyrical elegance and playfully barbed poetry confirmed Chingonyi’s potential, it is in this eagerly awaited second collection, A Blood Condition, that Chingonyi’s poetic voice finds its full-throated maturity.
Where the previous book gauged the gulf between the poet and his ancestry in splintered explorations of grief, loss, black masculinity and belonging, A Blood Condition binds and expands that quest to the mythological cosmology of the Tonga people's Nyami Nyami, “the river god [who] remembers what is forgotten between generations” and who gives his supplicants sustenance in difficult times.
It proves capacious enough to accommodate all the poet’s Zambian and British literal and metaphorical inheritances. Invoking Nyami Nyami throughout the collection, Chingonyi – “the child [who] would remember the legacy knitted in to the songs” – augments that traditional cosmology with his own personal, familial and musical touchstones, including his grief for the death of his mother, first broached in Kumukanda.
That deep introspection becomes the vulnerable and brave heart of the book, rendered into jewel-like poems in “Origin Myth”, a crown of sonnets – a traditional form where the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next. This skilfully woven sequence contextualises his mother’s hospitalisation because of HIV/AIDS complications; although Chingonyi doesn’t mention the disease by name, lines like “a ghost note in simian blood” and the Bemba phrase “Bamalwele ya akashishi” (“Those that suffer from the germ”) more than hint at this viral notion of inheritance from which the collection draws its title. It is also a means to contemplate the various mutations of grief – fear and survivor’s guilt, for example. The sequence yokes the past seamlessly to the present, sonnet by sonnet, in a way that recalls how DNA replicates itself slightly differently as it passes from parent to child.
DNA’s association with inheritance is a trope Chingonyi wields with more expansive deliberation in a later section, “Genealogy”, in which other deceased members of his family, including his father, and their traditions and possessions are memorialised in short, punchy poems. This contemplation of loss and its resolution extends to elegies for the poet Roddy Lumsden and the hip hop emcees Albert “Prodigy” Johnson and Carl “Haystee” Samuel. How to contain all that heartache and privation without allowing it to consume you? Chingonyi concludes that “all of us might carry a well of myth/ in the pit of our pith/ maybe it is by such melodies we exist.”
Music has always been something of a palliative for Chingonyi, who is currently undertaking a postgraduate degree on the confluence of music and poetry. More than half the poems contain a reference to music, dance or song – explicitly so in titles like “Epithalamium”, “Canticle” and “16 Bars for the Bits”. Chingonyi is a DJ and producer, and the vocabulary of emcees (“a younger/ bussin’ a half-decent/ beatbox”) peppers these erudite but colloquial poems, mostly in free verse, but full of assonance and consonance.
That musical ear also makes itself felt implicitly in the highly compressed and superbly controlled long sentences that are a trademark of Chingonyi’s poetic diction, allowing him to juxtapose language, sound and meaning in precise and surprising imagery; “the dancers heave and swell, in search of thrills/ like droplets moistening a windowsill” in the poem “Viral”. In combination with the noticeable suppression of the “I” of the first person voice, the effect is somewhat like being privy to the poet’s actual thoughts. It all makes for an elegantly spare – there’s lots of white space in this book – cathartic and poignant but never indulgent collection that invites repeated reading. DB
A Blood Condition is published by Chatto & Windus at ￡10
Buried Gods Metal Prophets by Maria Stadnicka ★★★★☆
Welcome to “the Sputnik Wing for irrecoverables”, St Joseph’s Orphanage, Romania, where the state is doing all it can to cover up the true nature of the “irrecoverable” children’s condition.
Between 1987-1991, at least 10,000 in Romania’s overcrowded orphanages were infected with HIV, believed to be caused by dirty needles used in vaccinations. In the poems of Buried Gods Metal Prophets, we witness this tragedy mainly through the eyes of two young children known only as “Bed 27” and “Bed 28”.
Born in the late 1970s, like the author, they are part of the decre?ei, the generation of children born after the Communist government’s Decree 770 placed severe restrictions on abortion and contraception. Everything they read and write is censored, even their Christmas letters to “Dear Comrade St Nikolai”.
For these children the HIV epidemic is an accepted part of life, like the gas masks they are taught to use in Morning Drill, or their nocturnal abuse by Father Michael, or the forms they are given to fill in before Confession (“Tick committed sins, as appropriate”). And then there is bullying, the same the world over: one young girl is teased, “Bed 28 is a boy’s name.” In extremis, the poems’ speakers still keep a sense of humour: “Frostbite overlooks me when it comes/ nearby. I’m not that handsome./ Brother, you’ve got the looks.”
To write these poems, UK-based Romanian poet Maria Stadnicka drew on a range of first-hand experiences – her siblings’ childhood in an orphanage, her own years working in one, and her interviews with women who had carried out illegal abortions. That research shows through in the details and small rituals of these benighted lives – “We call them Soldiers./ Butts picked off at bus stations; lit/ behind the canteen”.
Though they often have a tone of bruising directness, it would be wrong to cast these poems as straightforward accounts. Like Emily Dickinson, Stadnicka tells it slant. She juxtaposes poems in phonetic dialogue ("I cannots use knivez-nd-forgz") with reproductions of maps, censored documents and doctored reports (illustrated by Antonia Glücksman). These techniques recall Peter Reading’s equally unsentimental, socially conscious cut-ups in Perduta Gente, but to them Stadnicka adds a tough surrealism that is all her own. When she creates dreamlike images, her tight diction gives them the bite of reality: “A stone grows/ in my mouth./ Between my flesh/and my heart,/ rust.”
The line between realism and surrealism isn’t always clear-cut. A couple of these poems previously appeared in her 2020 collection Somnia – a fierce and haunting book of troubled dreams – and in that context seemed to be darkly comic flights of imagination. But in the broken reality of Buried Gods Metal Prophets, where nothing makes sense, they look drawn from life. TFS
Buried Gods Metal Prophets is published by Guillemot at ￡12
Writing the Camp by Yousif M Qasmiyeh ★★★☆☆
This is an important debut. It is a work of rare integrity, in both senses – moral principle, and unified construction. Yousif M Qasmiyeh has set himself an impossible task, and more or less accomplished it. It won’t be every reader’s taste, and wasn’t entirely to mine, but this is a book likely to be studied for years to come.
The camp of the title is Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, where Qasmiyeh was born and raised. “Only those who have never seen a place can describe the place,” he writes; for him, description is always a kind of simplified half-truth, a betrayal of the indescribable reality. Qasmiyeh has seen the camp, and is too honest to betray it in this way. And so the task he has set himself is to write about it without describing it. Qasmiyeh wants to tell us what the camp means, rather than how it looks, smells or sounds. It is “an attempt to stay silent”.
To do this, he rejects the tactics of most lyric poetry – the beautifully rendered detail, the sentimental anecdote. What do we get instead? Abstraction: rhetorical questions, philosophy, fables, epigrams, fragments, maxims, riddles, koans. Lines like “There is nothing sacred about the sacred save the eyes,” or “The refugee is the revenant of the face.” About half these proverbs seemed to me to express a hard-won truth, made beautiful yet elusive through their finely wrought concision. The other half seemed like gnomic wibble. Still, half is a pretty good hit-rate.
Almost all the poems take the same form, in which each line is a complete sentence (or several complete sentences) followed by a stanza-break, often in a flat, affectless prose. In a string of early short poems, this voiceless voice proves surprisingly versatile. “Past Tense”, about an asylum claim, uses it to capture the moment bureaucracy becomes violence: “The being is being strangled somewhere nearby.” In “The Dinghy”, that flat style gives a tragic bathos to the story of a drowned friend, made all the more painful by the space left for the reader to fill in the emotion. Then there’s the excellent “My Mother the Philosopher” – not a poem about the poet’s mother, but a subtle, probing criticism of his own need to put words in her mouth, “to guide myself, at the expense of my mother, into a place where only people with loud voices are allowed to exist.”
But in a run of longer mid-collection poems, the unblinking consistency of the book's style and preoccupations becomes exhausting and numbingly repetitive. “What is a camp? Is it not a happening beyond time?” is a line that could come from any poem in this book. The monotony is, I think, intentional. It forces the reader to experience “time” in the way it is experienced in the camp, as “a series of knotted nothingness that repeats itself for the sake of monotony, but also for the sole reason of unsettling that monotony itself and reclaiming air”.
Qasmiyeh, an Oxford academic, writes poetry that explores the space between the lyric and the essay. But at his most essayistic, reading him can feel like turning up to a perceptive and intelligent sociology lecture halfway through, without the right notes: “Thresholds embody a polite and, to a certain degree, dilute strategy to appropriate more land without vocally unsettling the socio-political codes of conduct.”
Or try this: “Those would be the ones that the being should observe without allowing itself to change the changed but, instead, to re-gather the particles of its time, this time, that will start to roam the place before it.” I’m embarrassed to admit it, but each time I read that line my eyes glaze over.
It is more than 70 pages into the book before we encounter a person’s name. But Qasmiyeh can’t resist the descriptive itch entirely. Writing the Camp is – at least, for this reader – most compelling when it is at its most descriptive, in a clutch of later pieces which offer glimpses of the camp’s butcher, its midwife and its suffocating bomb shelter.
The title poem vividly captures the way that “intertwined clothing lines and electrical cables, well-shielded balconies, little oxygen and impenetrable silences are all amassed in this space.” But in many of these poems, the impenetrable silences overwhelm everything else. TFS
Writing the Camp is published by Broken Sleep at ￡10.99
The Earliest Witnesses by GC Waldrep ★★★★☆
“Illness makes the body legible,” GC Waldrep writes in The Earliest Witnesses, his seventh collection. Many of these poems are informed by his physical ailments – which range from a devastating neurological condition to more minor eye problems (“Dead spots/ in my vision, little brass keys where no locks had been”). When Waldrep looks at the world, we are reminded that looking is a physical act. Words he reads are copied “carefully into the flesh of my retinas”.
But the American poet – who used to live in an Amish community, and is now part of a small Anabaptist sect – is far more interested in the spirit than the body. He is deeply concerned with belief. In our sceptical age, he suggests, this requires a bit of misdirection: “I write about ‘the eye’ because you will not accept ‘faith’/ or ‘the soul.’”
Doubt and acceptance, spiritual harmony and disharmony, are the real measures of health and illness here. In his wrestle with the divine, Waldrep likes to give abstract ideas tangible weight (“Gnosticism,/ its thick deictic hull”). In one poem he writes: “I could feel my vows being lifted from my body/ the way a novice cook lifts a heavy pot lid, carefully/ and with more than the usual fear.”
Like Geoffrey Hill, to whom he is often compared, Waldrep lives with one foot in the past. A number of poems are inspired by visits to rural Welsh and English churches, often abandoned – though he rejects that word. “No space is ‘abandoned,’ ‘disused,’” he insists. People may come and go, and “Every century or four someone scrubs the/ images from the walls and replaces them with new images”, but these spaces have an enduring vitality of their own, brought into focus by Waldrep’s sharp, strange vision. In “Llandeilo Churchyard (II)” he writes: “Like a bubble, like a stretch of glass, the church understands gravity, but not quantity. It worships the dog-rose, a bit.”
That comic last-minute swerve – “a bit” – is characteristic. Waldrep turns corners on a sixpence: a single line might swoop from feverish, apocalyptic visions to knowing humour. His restless intellect makes wonderfully unexpected leaps, but also leads him into an unfortunate tic of obscure name-dropping – expect asides like “(Huidobro,/ by way of Weinberger)”.
Just as TS Eliot’s "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker" aren’t really about those places, the poems of The Last Witnesses roam far from Ely Cathedral, North Walsham and the other places of their titles. They are deeply felt arguments between the poet and himself, following hidden routes mapped out by recurring symbols of private significance.
One or two of those symbols would have more impact if used more sparingly. Poems blur together, in a collection sometimes prone to repetition. Lines about a Welsh festival in “Castle Woods, Dinefwr” (“We are all guests at the Festival of the Senses:/ some of us blindfolded, some of us the dispensers of blindfolds”) read like a rough draft of a line that appears a few pages later in “Llandeilo Churchyard I” (“We are all invited to the Festival of the Senses. Some blindfolded, some as vendors of blindfolds”), a poem which goes on to develop that image to better effect.
But if I suggest that this long book would have benefitted from tighter editing, I’m partly complaining about having too much of a good thing. Waldrep’s poetry is excellent, from its startling images (“winter’s blue throat”) to its percussive music. You can hear the racket of the horse and cart in “the land a scrap, a cusp, the crupped haunch/ that moves ahead of the carriage in its plush mechanicals.”
And then there are the moments when, between two febrile medication-dreams or images of the landscape, Waldrep calmly drops in a plain account of his emotional state, and it pulls your heart out of your throat. “I was no longer in love with my life, or with anyone’s.” “It has been many years now since I walked by the sea/ I would not describe myself as unhappy/ Only devastated”.
This is the kind of heartbreaking simplicity that he achieves in a parenthetic aside at the end of “Carn Gogh”, named after a hill in the Brecon Beacons. It's a poem where landscape, body and spirit come together with grace: “(When I was dying, it was my mother’s job, every few hours, or several times an hour, to wake me. She shook me slightly, insistently, by the shoulder or the arm. She called my name.) (And I said, later, yes, belief is like that.)” TFS
The Earliest Witnesses is published by Carcanet at ￡12.99