The best recent poetry – review roundup
Tomorrow Someone Will Arrest You by Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic, £10.99)
This impassioned, compelling collection moves between rhythmically rich evocations of friendship, motherhood, love and sex – “Walk with me as we disappear into darkness / We shall lock our lips, we shall lock our thighs” – and urgent political topics: caste prejudice, freedom of expression, racism and the oppression of women and LGBTQ+ people. In the title poem, addressing the arrests of two human-rights activists in India in 2015, we see the violence of the corrupt state revealed: “Tomorrow someone will arrest you. The day after that, you / will be considered a ‘terrorist’ for life … Long Live Silence.” Kandasamy’s writing is fierce and direct in its criticism of this deadening, suffocating silence, and those in power who perpetuate it. These vital, beautiful poems burn with a radically illuminating rage.
Divisible By Itself and One by Kae Tempest (Picador, £10.99)
This collection covers a huge variety of forms, from punchy rhyming poetry that nods to Tempest’s prowess as a performer to playful works that experiment with white space on the page. The topics are just as diverse, including romance, the body as boundary and the environment. But at the heart of the book are tender, striking celebrations of queer and trans identity and community, such as the poem Love song for queens, studs, butches, daddies, fags and all the other angels. Tempest writes: “My people. My beautiful people. My beautiful trans people, / natural as life. / I’m so sorry I was not in your love sooner. / I have been so cold without you. I wish I’d spent all these years in / your arms and close to you / and had you shave my head and slap my back and take me under / your soft wing … ” At a moment where transphobia seems virulent in UK culture, these lyrical odes to kinship, intimacy and hard-won self-love feel particularly affecting and important.
To 2040 by Jorie Graham (Carcanet, £15.99)
The American writer’s visionary 15th collection is one of her best books yet. These luminous poems consider the importance of attending to the wisdom nature offers us: “I look up before the / air becomes unbreathable, / I close my eyes and try to see it again, / the stream. It is a temple. It is / rushing. How could we / not have heard.” Graham reinvents Wallace Stevens’s legacy of radiant philosophical verse as she seeks to discover how thought and language might throw off their human biases and move into spaces of liberating environmental openness – “How do I / not summarise anything … No sum / towards which to strive. No / general truth. None.” A profound engagement with how our thinking about nature might change, and transform us in the process.
Local Interest by Emily Hasler (Pavilion, £10.99)
This spirited and wry collection is focused intently on the details of place – the poet’s local area, where the south of Suffolk and north of Essex meet. Hasler brilliantly builds this locality for her reader with delightful, sometimes comical specificity: “10 consecutive hot summers / 9 bagged dogshits / 8 CDs on string / 7 sets of Woolworths crockery / 6 pieces of oasis / The fifth rebuilding of the bridge.” She is sensitively attuned to the layers of human and natural history that are found in the smallest spaces. Her affectionate, practised eye brings the natural world around her to vivid life, in poems that celebrate the intimate beauty of dwelling: “The world / was shuddering on the leeside / of its crux, the loose ribbon / of peninsula ruffled still … / but no, not moonstruck – self-disturbed / hares leap from the earth.”
The Ink Cloud Reader by Kit Fan (Carcanet, £12.99)
A moving, lyrically potent collection charting the interconnected impacts of political and personal fracture. In a series of poems about Hong Kong, we see the complicated mixture of love, danger and anguish that infuses the writer’s relationship with the city of his birth: “bound to be here / in the divided capital / of capital in the sticky / heat of chaos”. This is a book of pin-sharp, dazzlingly original images, felt most keenly in poems that consider the terrain of loved ones’ sick bodies, be they adored lover (“your lipid membrane looks as lifeless / as the dark side of the moon / your spike glycoprotein red as roses / nimble as hands”) or suffering mother (“It’s my mother’s face I want, / a desert face, squid-white. / The cancerous cells that kiss / her elongated back … I want. / It was my home. They stole it and I want it back”). Here the losses of place and the losses of the body tumble into each other, creating a painfully raw yet deeply affecting poetic universe.