The best recent poetry collections – review roundup
Will Harris’s Rendang (Granta, £12.99) is a sharp and assured debut collection that meditates on the multiplicity of identity, the shaky building blocks that make up a country and the politics of exhibition. It travels from actual terrains – in London, Chicago, Jakarta – to the surreal “purple rock” of “Planet Mongo”, and this exploratory curiosity is matched by the collection’s formal expansiveness, encompassing accomplished prose-poems, concrete poetry and lyric sequences. Harris suffuses the everyday with a mythic dignity, so that the drunk singing Otis Redding in a pub takes on the tragic stature of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and “bees groan inside / the carcass of the split bin bag” as Samson’s biblical riddle is brought to summer pavements to later “draw forth – not sweetness – something new”. As the speaker ticks “Other, Mixed” on forms, he muses that “some / drunk nights I theorize / my own transmembered norms”, wryly using the non-standard English “transmembered” to evade being trapped in bureaucratic boxes himself. The collection leans into a vocabulary all of its own, and announces itself as an artefact that will not be dislodged.
Mina Gorji’s debut, Art of Escape (Carcanet, £9.99), maps with deliberate fierceness the huge variety of places that can be made a home. It probes what happens – for humans and animals alike – when refuge turns hostile, and how life must adapt in order to survive. A wasp is a “tiny emigrant […] smuggled in Aleppo oak”; the speaker finds comfort in a “whalebone house”; the Oxford ragwort “escaped” its “cultivated bed” for a freer life in “the heart of London”. These are acute moments of noticing, and Gorji is sensitive to the small victories of beauty in the banality of everyday life – shoots growing on infertile ground to allow “such gentleness / from what seemed heedless rock”, dust swirling so that “The air is filled / with particles of light”. Camouflage and migration become necessary “when danger comes”, and Gorji constructs intricate, considered poems which encourage us to democratise our attention and empathy.
Killing Kanoko / Wild Grass on the Riverbank (Tilted Axis, £9.99) is a new dual edition of Itō Hiromi’s most lauded collections, translated by Jeffrey Angles. Often described as one of Japan’s most important contemporary poets, Itō’s work addresses with uncompromising frankness issues of post-partum depression, sexuality, infanticide and the isolation engendered through migration. In sequences such as “Kanoko eats my time / Kanoko pilfers my nutrients / Kanoko threatens my appetite”, ugly desires strain against repeated rigid grammatical structures. Boundaries between the self, other people, plants and animals are self-consciously porous; there is a constant cycle of consumption and secretion: “I scratched him lightly, but his skin grew raw, and liquid began seeping out / Mother said, all living things get eaten by mosquitoes”. Itō entwines the sensual and the grotesque in this radical, relentless collection.
Crispin Best’s debut Hello (Partus, £10) is playful, discursive and melancholic, with the absurd associative logic of a dream or the internet, “where a pop-up notification / blocks the sunset” and “nights arrive like iguanas in suits”, disparate images drift strangely in poems that wonder “what if”. Digital anxieties are embedded throughout the collection as “your inbox gently fills” and we see “a phone glinting / with what I hope is no information”. Best weaves phrases that feel like whispers – “no-one / has leaned over and kissed me / in a long time” – with puns that have the cadence of a dad joke: “i ask for your thoughts on wind turbines / ‘big fan’ you say”. Humour laces vulnerability with shyness. He also writes tenderly about the obsolete – “o curly wurly wrapper / o nokia 3210” – giving the disposable real poignancy. Although the world is sometimes terrible, Hello raises a hand to tentatively suggest that “one good thing / about being alive / is the view”.