This season's poetry offerings are diverse and powerful, ranging from avant-garde explorations to poignant testimonies from Palestine. Below, we delve into six notable collections that showcase the breadth and depth of contemporary poetry.
Haunting the Black Air by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Joseph's follow-up to his TS Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert pushes his poetic approach further into radical territory. He pays homage to avant-garde writers like Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey while exploring themes of nostalgia, grief, and haunting sound. The syntax can be challenging on first reading, but persistence reveals unabashed lyricism that finds beauty on dancefloors, city streets, and in Trinidadian landscapes. As Joseph writes: “the way music fills the room, how we embrace until / we become flare bright, light as the white refraction / of the sun upon the summit of hills.”
Selected Poems by Leontia Flynn (Carcanet, £14.99)
A Next Generation poet and Forward prize winner, Flynn has been publishing for over 20 years, yet her poems remain remarkably fresh. This collection is a glorious reintroduction to her mordant wit, imaginative image-making, and ability to puncture pretension. Letter to Friends from 2011 offers a brilliant, Auden-esque dissection of the early 21st century, worth a library of political analyses: “daily threats brought to our Way of Life / by man-made imminent apocalypse / though neither really outweighs private grief.” Pleasures abound on every page.
You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, edited by Jorie Graham, translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor (Penguin, £12.99)
Featuring over 30 poets from Gaza and the West Bank, with work written in recent years, these poems testify to the resilience of artists and the role of poetry in giving voice and bearing witness during crisis. There is a taut urgency throughout: “who knows how we’ll exit love. / Will it be on foot, will it be in a shroud?” asks Hamid Ashour. Joy and humour appear too, even if pitch black, as in Khaled Juma's gravedigger trading shovel for excavator: “I have built a business with death. / Now we are first on the stock exchange. / Second to none.”
Melete by Jennifer Lee Tsai (Bloodaxe, £14)
Lee Tsai's debut is a sprawling mix of poetry and prose exploring second-generation Chinese identity in the UK: “She cannot fully know her mother tongue / but she can speak the language / of the coloniser.” The book feels roughly hewn, fiercely articulating the need to write: “She wants to empty the contents of her mind upon the page / and create something beautiful.” In exploring “the splitting of myself into two halves” and showing the ambivalences of making sense of it, Lee Tsai creates a landmark work on the British southeast Asian experience.
Sparrow on the Rooftop by Rachel Long (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
The playfulness of Long's debut My Darling from the Lions gives way to a directness of diction and image in this second collection. Poems range across alcoholism, eating disorders, and grief from a relationship's end, pulling the reader up with their unflinching gaze. In Sad Shower, after a work by Tracey Emin: “Now you are entirely / hungry, a rib on the pavement.” Yet Long's lightness of touch prevents overwhelming pain, converting it into recovery: “that living- / room dancing might make it better; / and by increments, it does.”
Somebody Should Have Pressed Record by Galia Admoni (Strange Region, £13)
What if loneliness led you to start a relationship with an imaginary version of Brassic actor Joseph Gilgun? That's the premise of Admoni's narrative poem, where the central character is haunted by “Joe”, part unreliable friend, part life coach: “Careful. They'll start giving you targeted ads for therapy.” Admoni's tone recalls Georges Perec, jabbing at contemporary living while revealing difficulties in making sense of ourselves without others: “Try saying 'I love you' in the mirror. / Your reflection says nothing.” The conceit and the book are a delight.
Rishi Dastidar's latest collection is Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches).
