There may very well be people who pick up a book of poetry and read it through from the beginning to the end but it is not what I do and I have a feeling it is not general practice
John Ashbery
Welcome to my occasional selection of poems from new books in my reading pile: seven pages for the week ahead. It’s not a “best of”, more a playlist of things that have stayed with me as I move between books at bedtime and then back into the world of winter in England this year. I’ll explain some of the reasons for my choices as we go.
Graeme Richardson is a very old friend, whose poems I have been reading for over quarter of a century, so it’s hard for me to sum up how I feel about seeing them in his first full collection, Dirt Rich (Carcanet). If you’d like to hear me try, come along to the online launch on 3rd February. One thing I will say is that some of the poems I find most moving are those that address the reality of parenthood, including its pain — still arguably an under-explored topic in modern poetry. I thought of this one recently as I played — possibly for the last time — in the snow with my youngest child:
In January 2021, during the second lockdown, I hosted an online discussion of the books on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist that year. A poll at the end showed the audience favourite was the outsider choice: Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion Poetry). The judges agreed. Kapil’s sequence of vivid, compact free-verse poems about the violence of colonialism (figured as a house stay) is, to my mind, one of the best books to win the prize. A new book, Autobiography of a Performance (The 87 Press), presents extracts from all her work woven into scripts made with the multidisciplinary artist, Blue Pieta. Here is one of the sections from How to Wash a Heart:
Kapil fans will want to know that she has a new prose poem in Nature Matters: Vital Poems from the Global Majority (Faber), the first anthology of nature writing by African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora poets in the UK, edited by Mona Arshi and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Another new poem in here that I enjoyed was Moniza Alvi’s “At Walberswick”, which considers the fact that some locals in the Suffolk coastal village claim to have seen two circus elephants ferried across the River Blyth, and yet no evidence for this newsworthy event survives. It is, of course, not only about that:
Christian Bök’s The Xenotext: Book 1 (2015) received a lot of publicity for the scientific experiment at the heart of it: “to encode a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium, thereby writing a text durable enough to outlast any apocalypse”. More articles appeared when The Xenotext: Book 2 (Coach House Books) was published in Canada last year, outlining the successful result. There is more to Bök than a big idea, though: the poems composed around the necessarily slender “Xenotext” itself are panoramically imagined expansions of the concept, inscribed with a strikingly precise formality and vocabulary. Here is a section from “My Works, Ye Mighty”, which rewrites Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to give voice to the cosmic instinct to endure:
Another poet whose imagination is exercised by the infinity of apocalyptic visions is John Wilkinson. Many of my favourite Wilkinson poems, from Iphigenia (2004) to Courses Matter-Woven (2015), are cannonading sequences where an idea ramifies into verse paragraphs that feel like a rapid documentary montage of the present moment. So I was drawn to the final part of his new collection, In Abeyance (The Last Books), where the blandly disempowering phrase, “rest assured”, becomes the running motto of an extractive digital society of “neighbours” divided and controlled by fear:
I’ve always liked Tom Paulin’s poetry for the way it combines a political directness with a waywardness of voice which is itself a political position on the use of English. But I can’t pretend Namanlagh (Faber), nominated for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, is his best work. I think the poet himself knows this, though, which gives the poems a diffident charm: many are about recovering from depression through small moments of noticing. The final poem appeals to me because I once lived in a fly-haunted riverside flat by Folly Bridge, on the edge of central Oxford, a place that always seemed to be humming something about the Great Poets alluding to each other. I read Paulin’s poem as a stepping-away from taking all that too seriously, after a lifetime of teaching English Literature, at the “end of / National Poetry Day when words take off”:
(It was W.H. Auden, incidentally, who called Yeats “silly”, and in later life wrote a similarly light tribute to the poets who inspired him: “Fondly I ponder You all: / without You I couldn’t have managed / even my weakest of lines.” (“A Thanksgiving”))
Finally, a poem about Norwich, where I live now, from an exquisitely paced pamphlet, Anna Reckin’s Lavender and Other Colours (intergraphia). St Giles is a medieval church in the city, famous for the wisteria that flowers over its walls in spring. “graduated lilacs tonal parallel / for flint” are words I will remember when I see it again this year.
