The best recent poetry – review roundup
Pitch & Glint by Lutz Seiler, translated by Stefan Tobler (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Meticulously translated from German, these poems create an inimitable sound world where everything is muted as if beneath a blanket of snow, whispering, sizzling, crackling. The crackling, we realise with a sense of shock, is radioactive uranium, as Seiler hauntingly describes a lost rural East Germany, where villages literally disappear as they collapse into the uranium mines beneath their streets and industrial activities are carried out with brutal disregard for the environment or human health. Seiler’s subject is the lost generation who inhabit these “utterly damned” villages: we see abject miners drowning their sorrows with “spoilheap glow”, Kafkaesque scenes where children metamorphose into bugs, and Seiler’s father, Crusoe, as he returns home with his “Geiger counter heart”. As Seiler remarks, “little here leads to the poem”, but the shadowy world evoked has a strange, muted poetry, where incipient violence is made palpable with quiet swerves into the surreal.
Mothersong by Amy Acre (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
Mothersong is indeed a book about motherhood; there are poems about postnatal anxiety and organ prolapse, and a spiky, ekphrastic poem about David Jones’s Madonna and Child in a Landscape: “when he blessed her / she wanted to spit in his face / tell him Boy / I’m the one who wiped away your shit”. But there’s a more curious book here too, and a more expansive one, which puts the word “mother” through the mincer, and by doing so takes us to unexpected places: Egyptian mummies, displaced people finding mother figures in restaurant owners, and excursions into space (the Nostromo’s computer in Alien is MU-TH-UR 6000). Taking risks – “high / and wild on a rope / that you’ll never / stop crossing” – is central, and the best poems embrace this formally, along with the possibility that the poem might fall off the tightrope. See Also is made out of dictionary definitions, Origin Story consists of a list of smells associated with a lover, and The Year of the Horse is composed using words that first “birthed” in 1990: “Twentysomethings geeked out over the World Wide Web / while polyamorous malware circled in hoodies.”
Infinite in Finite by Andrew Wynn Owen (Carcanet, £12.99)
Underpinning this collection is the history of western philosophy. Put simply, there are two traditions, traceable back to Plato and Aristotle: in one the real world is an unperceivable beyond (the noumenal); in the other it is what we perceive through the senses (the phenomenal). Owen focuses primarily on the senses: “Optical process, not hallucination, / Is how I gauge events.” The approach leads to some exhilarating moments of instantiation where philosophical concepts are embodied in the grain of the writing, such as this view of an owl, which shows how the what in what we perceive is constituted by consciousness, what we know: “A chalky tussle longbowed through the blank / And you said, ‘That’s an owl!’” This is precision-engineered rhymed verse. At first glance it looks old-fashioned, as does some of the vocabulary – “go forth” – but we soon realise that rhyme itself operates as a limit, a finite, which can paradoxically lead to an infinite, as it echoes into the distance. It is this that enables Owen to link the two traditions, and to find the infinite not in a god, but in that which we recognise through the senses: love, animals, clouds, rewilding, and in the making that is poetry and art.
Enter the Water by Jack Wiltshire (Corsair, £14.99)
Part Beckett, part Robert Macfarlane on LSD, Wiltshire’s verse novel is unusual in several ways, not least its openness of form. Like a mobile swirling in the wind, this lets the poem reflect diverse narratives and flip between them: the story of the writer holed up in his university digs, boiling pasta in a kettle; the story of Storm Eunice; and the story of an antihero evicted from his home, journeying towards the coast accompanied by a talking blackbird. Kicking off from a bad place – war in Ukraine, Priti Patel’s attack on refugees, a rain of pigeon shit – this is a world in fragments where, because of genomic instability, we are quite literally falling apart. From here, the story finds itself groping towards a kind of rebirth in a warts-and-all nature, where swimming pools are full of old men’s piss. It’s in water and a love of swimming that the poem finds its sense of renewal; its fragments come together in a denouement celebrating “the simple hereness of things / like water”.
The Coming Thing by Martina Evans (Carcanet, £12.99)
It’s not often you pick up a book and feel within five pages that this is what you’ve been waiting to read your whole life. It’s set in the 1980s Cork punk scene, and “the coming thing” refers both to the arrival of computers and to narrator Imelda’s looming experience of abortion in mainland Britain, a subject that has lost none of its urgency in a world where access rights continue to be rolled back. Meanwhile, we are immersed in Irish punk, painted in all its filth, fun and fury: pills, seances, Specials gigs, bondage trousers, existentialists and Bulmers. What the Pogues did to folk music when they took it by the scruff of the neck, Evans does to the sonnet (literally “little song”), creating furious narrative bursts with the energy of three-minute punk songs: “The sky / was the colour of petrol, everyone on Pondies and cider screaming & / gobbing lime-green phlegm on MacCurtain Street.” I’ll be giving this book to all my friends, and if Carcanet bring it out on vomit-coloured vinyl, I’ll do it all over again. Buy it or, better, steal it.