In the past, as a regular poetry reviewer — and therefore a regular builder of review copy pillars — I would usually end the year with a list of recommendations.
But this December I’ve enjoyed the realisation that I’m now one of the readers for whom such lists are intended.
So I thought I would do two things. The first is to compile some of the books that have caught my eye in other people’s end-of-year lists (below).
The second is to invite readers of this newsletter to email me their recommendations — one poetry publication from 2022, author and title — which I will put into another post before the end of the year. Nominations are open until December 23rd!
Here, then, are Other People’s Poetry Books of the Year:
100 Queer Poems (Vintage), edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan
The year’s most notable anthology […] has at its core a generous and expansive definition of queerness that finds room for poets such as W.H. Auden, John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop, while including modern, innovative voices such as Verity Spott and Harry Josephine Giles. With a thematic arrangement ranging across relationships and families, the urban and natural world, and queer histories and futures, there is a great sense of kinship running through the poems. (Rishi Dastidar, Guardian)
Will Alexander, Refractive Africa (Granta)
The most ambitious book of the year is Will Alexander’s Refractive Africa, drawing on Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola to reframe the history of Congo and vocalise an energetic resistance to colonialism. Alexander’s lines have an unstoppable energy allied to a thrilling phrase-making ability. He can devastate, too: “I appear to the Occidental eye as carbon without consequence”. Refractive Africa is a masterpiece, reminding us of poetry’s power to change how we feel and think. (Rishi Dastidar, Guardian)
Zaffar Kunial, England’s Green (Faber)
This year’s best collection is Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green. Plenty of 2022’s poetry books were like unsuccessful cakes: all the ingredients were there, but they weren't cooked all the way through. Kunial’s unity of vision and approach made England's Green stand out. He describes the England that made him through particularly English subjects — the Beatles, the Brontës, above all cricket — with an eye to his Kashmiri father and his upbringing in English and Urdu. Kunial shows how meaning comes not through words, but in and with them. Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize this year, it deserves to win. (Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times)
Sylvia Legris, Garden Physic (Granta)
Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic is the most refreshing book of the year. These are poems inspired by plants and flowers, but we are far from “A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!”. An apothecary and an alchemist, Legris shows us a dense and mysterious garden of verse, arranged in carefully cultivated harmonies: “Drip a drop in an ear to diminish an ache.” Everyone should tiptoe in: there’s nothing around quite like it. (Graeme Richardson, The Sunday Times)
Sandeep Parmar, Faust (Shearsman)
Sandeep Parmar’s Faust offers a profound exploration of Partition trauma and womanhood. Parmar’s work also sits alongside over 100 Indian-origin poets of the 20th and 21st century in the essential new Penguin Book of Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil. (Preti Taneja, New Statesman)
Sandeep Parmar’s ingenious collection has Faust as a roaming migrant, in poetry that repeatedly ruptures from within to bare itself as essay, diary and memoir. Parmar’s prescience makes us consider our relationship to nationhood, environment and hope: “I signed a contract in my blood to strive.” (Daljit Nagra, New Statesman)
Padraig Regan, Some Integrity (Carcanet)
2022’s most promising debut. Regan looks at food the way other poets look at paintings and people, noticing “the paper around the garlic like sheets of dry skin; // the skin around the onions like paper”, in still lifes humming with held-back feeling. “That there is grace in suffering / is not an excuse for suffering,” Regan writes. “I know this. I know my jaw / when it aches, I know my teeth.” Regan’s work also appears in Queering the Green (Lifeboat, £15), a showcase for LGBT+ Irish writers. My pick of the year’s anthologies, it places well-known poets like Colette Bryce alongside young writers yet to publish a full book (one of them, William Keohane, is clearly going places). (Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph)
Denise Riley, Lurex (Picador)
Denise Riley’s voice in Lurex — what a glittering title! — is wry, sceptical and melancholy, speaking in her ever-exciting linguistic medley of pastoral and street talk. And she goes to the heart of things, asking in one poem, “What hope is there of a purely secular grace?” (Marina Warner, New Statesman)
Lurex sounds her true note in compelling ways: by using language that feels slightly elevated but at the same time earthy and all-encompassing; by interrogating her identity as an individual, a parent and a poet with an intensity that might feel overwhelming if it weren’t moderated by bleakly ironical kinds of self-deflation and good humour; and by combining formal stringency with a marvellous generosity of attention to commonplace things as well as rarefied ones. No one else sounds like her. (Andrew Motion, Times Literary Supplement)
Philip Terry, The Lascaux Notebooks (Carcanet)
The earliest anthropoid verse is, unbelievably, resurrected in The Lascaux Notebooks by Jean-Luc Champerret. The translator Philip Terry tells us that Champerret, a French resistance codebreaker, recorded symbols he saw in Lascaux’s caves soon after their discovery in 1940, ordering them into grids of “ice-age poetry”. Attributing meanings to marks on the wall (reading three side-by-side glyphs as, say, “tooth”, “fruit”, and “hut”), Champerret seems to have translated then re-translated the symbols into longer lines to create a Paleolithic William Carlos Williams; “I have eaten / the fruit that / you were keeping in the hut”. (If that line sounds familiar, you might enjoy The Plum Review [Broken Sleep, £8.99], a stocking-sized mini-anthology in which 39 poets spoof Williams’s “This Is Just To Say”). (Tristram Fane Saunders, Daily Telegraph)