Pinks #28: Animal Facts
A week of poems I've enjoyed recently
Read each one separately — one to-day, another to-morrow — and then perhaps one or more of them may sink [in] and bear fruit
Turgenev, Poems in Prose (1878)
Lots of people liked my post last month featuring a week’s worth of short poems from recent reading:
So I thought I’d give it another spin. My model was the late-night radio show where the DJ has the freedom to play a mix of things without much more comment than the name of the track and the artist. This time, I’ve widened my range from recently-published books to include poems from magazines too, and sprinkled in a few links.
I found it hard to pick a favourite from Ian Duhig’s excellent new collection, An Arbitrary Light Bulb (Picador). So I decided to go with one that continues last week’s post about my discovery, as a teenager, that other poets sometimes made fun of Ted Hughes. This poem is much more than a joke about “Hawk Roosting” though:
And Duhig’s attempt at a bird poem pairs nicely with this fish one, from three fine new elegiac pieces by Gail McConnell in the latest
:
The poet is often a bird in the shapeshifting poems of Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings (And Other Stories), translated by Don Mee Choi. Not here, though:
After launching their new poetry list with Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach last month, Fitzcarraldo Editions have now brought Diane Seuss’ Modern Poetry — published in the US last year — into a beautifully printed UK edition:
I was happy to see new poems by Anthony Vahni Capildeo in the latest London Review of Books. The last line here has kept surprising me, like a daylight ghost, all week:
I always enjoy the use of Scots for translation, perhaps because it cannot stray so readily from a feeling for place and voice as local-to-nowhere Standard English. Colin Bramwell’s Fower Pessoas (Carcanet), a selection from the multiple voices of the great Portugese modernist, is a treat. This is by Pessoa’s Horatian heteronym “Ricardo Reis”:
Finally, I feel lucky to have a copy of Like Now (Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks), the latest pamphlet by American poet J.T. Kelly, who kindly sent it in defiance of the complexities and expense of transatlantic pamphlet shipping. It contains many short, witty and touching poems that I might have shared — here’s one:
That’s the seven for this week, but here’s a genuine DJ bonus track that I owe to whoever played it on BBC 6Music on Thursday morning — new music by the T.S. Eliot-Prize-winning poet Anthony Joseph: https://idol-io.ffm.to/blackhistory-2
Great point about Scots translation. Wouldn't have occurred to me!
Lovely. Thank you!