Afterburn by Blake Morrison (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Best known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that nothing is beneath poetic deliberation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer’s sister. The interwoven specificity and occasional nature of the poems is captivating: one feels their movement, “in the flesh, / in his memory / and in the words”, as they unspool with control and purpose. “I’m still capable of being in love.” This is a poet clearly still in love with life.
Into the Hush by Arthur Sze (Penguin, £12.99)
This first UK publication introduces readers to the current US poet laureate’s bold vision of the world’s fragility: one of unceasing iridescence and glimmer, even in the face of ecological destruction and dilapidation. While the title suggests a sonic organisation, it may be more apt to understand the poems as painterly brushstrokes. “When you’ve / worked this long your art is no longer art / but a wand that wakes your eyes to what is.” Single-line stanzas that decrescendo to em dashes recur, illustrating the silence into which Sze feels both world and body disappearing: “you have loved, hated, imagined, despaired, and the fugitive colours of existence have quickened in your body -”. Even in its continual replenishing beauty, the collection is eerie, as though these poems were a last attempt to bring order to the disorder of living. “What in this dawn is yours?” asks one. Perhaps nothing, because “once lines converge, lines diverge”.
