After missing two Fridays this month, I’m beginning to think this newsletter should be called Better Late Than Never. I’m hoping to have more time to post about recent poetry books and pamphlets… soon. For today though, a miscellany:
My nominations for the Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year:
In the centenary year of The Waste Land and Ulysses, the book that has absorbed and excited me most is one that extends the tradition of projecting epic into the cinema of modernity. Vivek Narayanan’s After (NYRB Poets), the inspired labour of a decade, derives more than 500 pages of new poems in English from the Sanskrit of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Working a free verse line as fine and tight as wire, Narayanan taps narrative for lyric electricity, all the while keeping the scaffolding of the story cycle — and the city of scholarship that surrounds it — in view with his generous notes.
If I could nominate a critic to give a long-read account of any poet now writing, it would be Vidyan Ravinthiran, whose Worlds Woven Together: Essays on poetry and poetics (Columbia) ranges from Rae Armantrout to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra for some of the best close readings around: incisive, reflective, illuminating.
The new issue of a new magazine which I enjoyed guest editing enormously: https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/issue-2-contents. Propel is open to poets in the UK and Ireland who haven’t yet published a full collection. From my introduction:
One of the pleasures of putting this issue together was the opportunity to set so many different lyric shapes and styles singing alongside each other (doesn’t every poetry critic dream of being a DJ?) Another was noticing how many submissions unknowingly connected. So many, for example, mentioned food! I, too, mention food, every day. But poets have not always done so in their poems.
Pondering this as I made my choices, I found an echo in the writing of Sarah Maguire, whose first book, Spilt Milk, appeared in 1991. Maguire’s archive is held at the University of East Anglia, where I teach, and this year our Poetry MA students explored it for the first time, finding out how a full collection may crystallise from years of drafts; their false starts and sudden discoveries. Among the things we turned up was Maguire’s statement for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, in which she asks her own poems, “Why so much food?”, and answers herself: “Nothing seems more innocently personal and intimate; nothing carries such a freight of culture”.
A crooked little poem from O’Clock (Reality Street, 1995) by the American poet Fanny Howe, which convinced me to buy the copy I found in Oxfam this morning. “Written during a sojourn by Fanny in Britain and Ireland”, it is now out of print — but when I got home I discovered it is also available as a PDF on the publisher’s website: http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/resources/OP_pdf_books/O'Clock%20pages.pdf