Although I read a lot of poetry, I rarely sit down and read a book of poems front to back, unless I’m teaching, writing a review, or particularly want that extended formal experience. So here are some notes from the middle of several books I’ve recently begun. Feel free add your own recommendations in the comments, new or old…
Steve Ely, Eely (Longbarrow Books)
A book I really enjoyed a couple of years ago was Steve Ely’s The European Eel (2021) — so much so that I’ve now bought it twice. Eely (2024) reprints the full text of this extraordinary long poem about the life cycle of the eel, as sung in the epic voice of scientific fact. Ely is an admirer of Ted Hughes, and the documentary accuracy of Eel — its swift metaphors not encumbering the momentum of the verse — has the virtues of Hughes’s naturalism at its best. Here are the magnificent opening lines, which evoke a sublime of non-human scale, from abyss to “micron”:
In the Subtropical Convergence Zone
of the southern Sargasso, over the edge of the Nares Abyssal,
south-east of the Bermuda Ridge, snow is rising
in the water column from fifteen hundred feet.
Somewhere in Tethys’ salty darkness,
in spurts of milt and billowing roe, eels
are birthing their posterity, a spore-storm of eggs
in uncountable centillions, each buoyed
on its micron of oil.
Eventually, after a forty-month migration, we arrive in the rivers and streams of England, complete with “blue shit seeping from chemical toilets”. It’s here where the rest of Eely settles, as Ely leans gamely into nominative determinism with poems about his own encounters with the eel. I’m saving those for last, though, having jumped straight to the fourth and final section, Eelysium, which widens out again to tell the history of the Eastern fenlands in England. Ely’s notes are encyclopaedic and eye-opening, from the Storegga landslips of 8,000 years ago to political resistance to the drainage of the Fens. The fact that I would never willingly go near an eel and am reading this book anyway is in itself a very high recommendation. Buy direct from the publisher here: https://longbarrowpress.com/current-publications/steve-ely/
Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy (Penguin)
When I think back over twenty years of reading Peter Gizzi’s work, I remember first hearing about his collection Some Values of Landscape and Weather (2003) on Silliman’s Blog — the great daily source of information on new American poetry in the Noughties. What struck me was the vividness of its images, which in painterly terms moved from photorealism to almost pure abstraction: “more sparkling than sun on brick / October’s crossing-guard orange”; “the white curled backs / of snapshots tucked in a frame”; “When the sky came down / there was wind, water, red”. I went to the States a couple of years later, bought the book and also heard Peter read, in a heartfelt, chanting voice that brought home the importance of song to his verse.
So it’s great to see his latest collection also being published in the UK. Fierce Elegy is still fired by colour and song (“a blinding shimmer / on new blacktop in a sun shower”). But more to the fore these days is a kind of self-puzzling playfulness of statement, delicately pitched between melancholy and comic-strip. Take the title of “I’m Good to Ghost”, for example, a poem which contains the lines: “The poet is abuzz. / The poet becomes / a bug in air.” Or this from the opening poem, “Findspot Unknown”, which has the classic Gizzi cadence of visionary, throwaway poignancy:
I saw a better life, it was far off,
sun on moss next to a friend,
the softening air, the dandelion fluff.
It was kinda real, and kinda not.
Can’t see it today.
(This poem is also in Gizzi’s pamphlet Romanticism (2022), a nice sample of his recent work from an small UK press: https://distancenoobject.cargo.site/Gizzi-Romanticism)
Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Polkadot Wounds (Carcanet)
Capildeo is another poet I’ve been reading a long time; they are also one of the oldest friends I’ve made through poetry, which makes it hard to write about their work with detachment. Instead, I would endorse the endorsement of poet and critic Vidyan Ravinthiran: “Anthony Vahni Capildeo is the best poet — the most creatively various, intellectually dextrous, uncomplacent and uncomplaisant —I know of in the UK.”
I do particularly love Capildeo’s prose poetry, which runs through all their books. The opening sentence of “A Short Prayer to Coffee, Which Crosses the Sea” scans the horizon of their lexically restless and exact imagination, from the Turkish cezve to the Scottish haar, or sea fog:
Prayer lurks in the uncertain air between poetry and philosophy, in the heat at the coppery base of the cezve, in the steam of the human breath meeting the haar of a northern morning where the sun rises orange over a bitter sea.
Other favourites include “Full-Circle Bells” — I think the first sestina they have published, using the repeating words to knit the ends of a long-distance telephone call — and “Hot Springs Dissociation”, an eight-line poem that I spent an hour close-reading with my UEA Poetry MA students just to show them how much eight lines can contain. You can read four poems from Polkadot Wounds here: https://booksfromscotland.com/2024/07/polkadot-wounds-by-anthony-vahni-capildeo/
Harry Josephine Giles, THEM! (Picador)
Is a book of poems by a non-binary poet by definition a book of “trans poems”? That’s the implicit question of Harry Josephine Giles’ moving verse-essay, “May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?”, which you can read by scrolling down here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jun/15/landmark-anthology-100-queer-poems-published-for-pride-month. Giles’ political commitment to advocacy is apparent in the verbal nuance and organisation that informs her work, unfixing words from their expected places in order to lightly wrongfoot the reader from line to line:
I raise my great foot over the city of speech.
My chest is bound beneath two straps.
The one is named diversity and the other is named inclusion.
This is a book of exciting formal range, from prose to visual poetry. One poem I keep coming back to is “I Love to Hear Her Speak”, a joyfully incongruous series of single-line images improvised to the same tripping rhythm (x \ \ \ xx \ xx \):
a cling peach slithering out from its tin
a lip gloss ground into paste by the teeth
a burnt clutch scribbling down from the pass
a cowpat drilled by extravagant heels
Once I’ve got further with the rest of this collection, I suspect I’ll be going back to Giles’s Deep Wheel Orcadia (2021), a completely different kind of book: a sci-fi verse novel written in the Orkney dialect.
Gboyega Odubanjo, Adam (Faber)
The last decade has been one of real change in UK poetry. Not only have minority and marginal voices have been heard and supported by publishers, platforms and prizes, but there’s also been a substantial change in the way poetry is published; the variety of poetry that is available; and the people and communities who are making it happen. The appearance of Gboyega Odubanjo’s debut Adam from Faber this summer is a milestone in all of this. Ten years ago, Faber only had two poets on their list who weren’t white, and possibly even fewer who were writing in lower-case lines like an American. But it’s also a moment of renewed sadness at Gboyega’s death last year and the loss of all he might have written.
Adam takes the true story of the torso of a small black boy who was found in the Thames in 2001, and explores the symbolism of it for the poet’s own life as a British-Nigerian boy growing up in a London where “the streets are paved with cousins”. In the first poem, “The Garden”, the name of everyone in the extended family gradually becomes “adam”. The last line — with its image of the Noughties gift of a homemade CD — catches the anger, humour and hope that forged the quickfire Odubanjo voice:
this is not our country this is not a country it’s a burned CD and a tracklist we’ve written ourselves
Like one of his poetry heroes, Frank O’Hara, Gboyega had a natural ability to be the heart of a community. This was beautifully apparent last week at the staged launch for Adam organised by friends and family, which filled a theatre in Stratford. The readings were given added depth with a hypnotic landscape of video collages by Kareem Parkins-Brown, whose snappy pamphlet Oi You Lot was among those that Gboyega edited for the new Little Betty list. One of my favourite poems in Adam is “Against Resting in Peace”, which shows his remarkable, O’Hara-ish ability to be funny about everything, even the hardest things. I can’t think of anything else quite like it — or Adam — in British poetry: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/poetry-culture/2023/09/the-ns-poem-against-resting-in-peace
NOTES
You can browse the full Little Betty list here: https://badbettypress.com/little-betty/
We were lucky at the University of East Anglia to see Gboyega emerge as a poet — I wrote about that here:
Thank you for these reviews, Jeremy. As you say, there is the loss of all that Odubanjo might have written. This could also be said of the young poet Kathryn Bevis who died of cancer earlier this year. Seren managed to publish her first full-length collection 'The Butterfly House' just before her death. The poems in the first section 'After', all written, I think, after her diagnosis, make an extraordinary group and, reading them, I thought they placed her amongst the greats. They are so full of life - and love. The long poem 'Everyone will be there' (first published in the TLS) is especially glorious. It's an imagined 'parting party from this world' in which, for instance, 'There'll be nettle. Margie will plant / on my yoke the oak she grew from an acorn. / John will strew pear blossom, queen's crown, / ragged robin; Vicky will wreathe silverweed / cinquefoil blown backwards until it gleams.' It's a tour de force.