The best recent poetry – review roundup
Up Late by Nick Laird (Faber, £14.99)
Laird’s fifth collection glimmers with angsty maturity as it manoeuvres its way between introspection and elegy. In Theodicy we meet God-as-Martian-poet contemplating his creation: fire is “nature’s television”. But if there are elements of Martian poetry here, there is also a critique of this approach, suggesting that the endless search for the magical in the everyday is tinged with solipsism: “thinking everything was magic / was the same as thinking nothing was”. Elsewhere, Laird cracks open the poetry of sensitivity to reveal a raw sense of politics and injustice “as the rich get richer and the poor get fucked”. And in the long elegy for his dying father, Up Late, winner of the 2022 Forward prize for best single poem, the voice emerges with a lean and stripped-back clarity, using words and metaphors not to decorate or to defamiliarise, but simply to think with.

Women in Comfortable Shoes by Selima Hill (Bloodaxe, £12.99)
The miniaturism of Martial and Emily Dickinson is reinvented in this iridescent collection which brings together 11 sequences whose subjects range from girls misbehaving in convent schools to fridges contemplating death, plus a pair of bad-tempered sisters, a parrot and hair clips: “What I hated most were the clips / that lived and died in hundreds in her hair, / cascades of coloured clips with floral legs / incapable of understanding anything.” Over 254 pages, Hill creates a new kind of narrative poem, which has all the rewards of reading a good novel – or novels – yet she retains poetry’s unique ability to zoom in on minutiae, as when contemplating ants whizzing about like bumper cars: “maybe they are thinking Oh my God, / I’ll never find true love / before it’s over, / before some robin stabs me to death”.
Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness (Jonathan Cape, £12)
In the Englishman’s Home, McGuinness’s arresting opener, plays on the unspoken phrase “an Englishman’s home is his castle” to bring out the feeling of entrapment experienced by the arriving French speaker: “Little castles of milk teeth, / lined up to guard the helpless tongue – / … / it’s where you kept the language you arrived with. / You hid it all that time and now it’s gone.” The past for McGuinness is an irretrievable terrain, inhabiting the everyday with its ghostly present-absence, which in moments we are able to enter again as a tourist. The illuminating dérives of the finale, After the Flood, explore this further with in-situ jottings of journeys through mothballed Belgian stations, reminding us that the best poetry is often that which never makes it from the notebook.
You Don’t Have What It Takes to Be My Nemesis by CAConrad (Penguin, £12.99)
CAConrad sweeps across the Atlantic like a furious and raging whirlwind. Emerging from the queer visionary tradition of Whitman and Ginsberg, the cornerstone of CAConrad’s practice is a series of rituals and instructions which their readers are invited to share in: “Sit outside under shelter of a doorway … where you can easily touch, smell, taste, FEEL the storm. Lean your face into the weather … with eyes closed while water fills the wells of your eyes.” Other rituals involve CAConrad smearing themselves with dirt gathered from Emily Dickinson’s garden or sitting for seven days in front of a Rothko. Following the rituals, poems emerge: “we kill 3000 silkworms / to make one / pound / of silk / refrigerators / are where / we keep our bodies / before they become / our bodies.” CAConrad’s aim is to unplug from the corporate machine and reconnect themselves and their readers with the earth and animals and other people. This is poetry with real ambition that wants to hug us – it’s big, it’s queer and, like paprika, you can never have enough of it.

Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet, £12.99)
A debut packed full of surprises, from thoughtful mental health odes that elude closure, to poems surfing the lingos of the infotainment industries, to hilarious psychogeographical excursions through the tarnished oasis of Crystal Palace Park. At the centre of the collection nests another collection, attributed to the invented song collector AE Pious, of lost Irish drinking jigs: “If living is dying, / If singing is sighing, / If kicking pricks is tricky, / Try living in Kilnicky! / Why, try living in Kilnicky!” In The Squat Pen, which documents a visit to Seamus Heaney’s HomePlace, we read how Heaney’s famous pen now dangles in plexiglass in the Visitor’s Centre: “Why did I even come here?” the poet reflects. The poem, and the volume as a whole, charts the emergence of a new voice which is at once warm and edgy.

A Method, A Path by Rowan Evans (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
Evans shares with Geoffrey Hill a sincerity so intense at times that it can tip into anxiety, as well as an interest in English history. Withstances imitates the two-part line of Anglo-Saxon poetry, while On Eglond (“on an island”) sounds the voices of Anglo-Saxon “thrown up after centuries / as mutterings of a bog-queen”, wondering “How ‘group’ becomes ‘threat.’ / How ‘greet’ becomes ‘kill’”. Out of this engagement with the past, a kind of aesthetic emerges – the “method” and “path” of the title – based on the idea that the body inhabits and exists through space, as the poet here inhabits and exists through and between other voices. Formally inventive, rich in aslant borrowings, unafraid of visual and textual experiment, it is an exhilarating debut.