Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
“He likes it, he likes me / when I break. It gives him something / to assemble” admits the opening poem Ministry, in which two lakeside lovers tessellate themselves into the “bone-hard and lucent” landscape, as if their lovemaking were its own biome: “When I break, / I break, predictably, into song”. Hewitt’s speakers are music-mad: his world is replete with “air-quiet lullabies”, “the high black notes of starling flocks”, and “the soundproofed room of heaven”, a masterfully compressed abstraction that would seem to problematise the rich history of gay lyricism in Judeo-Christian systems of belief. But Hewitt’s words indubitably penetrate, with Nerudian passion and force: “I made for him a word / Adam could not have said inside the garden”. At the core of these unflinchingly sonorous lyrics are prose poems of tethering and untethering to a lover: “I needed to live whole within my longing, punished you for your kind, unknowing love.”
God Complex by Rachael Allen (Faber, £12.99)
Allen’s second collection fuses a chilly Plathian acuity with the compressive propulsion of Denise Riley, though the voice in this sensitively woven anti-epic is wholly singular. Here is a poetics of disintegration: poetic shape corrodes, personal and environmental ecologies pollute and are polluted. The impossible wish of a core speaker is to “disrupt the history of women’s stories in my life”. Who the God complex belongs to is unstable: “Blemish on your neck the shape and mark of a religious / burn, I did that. / I call it the worship condition.” Allen injects into the form the same painfully acquired co- and interdependency her speakers have with their partners: “I lived tethered so intensely to a present moment I lost interest in myself.” Perception, emotion and physiology unite in an exacting economy; one adjective struck, one feeling deleted, and the complexly electric latticework of God Complex would collapse. This collection’s fragility is its power.
How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps (Yale, £12.99)
“The start of a book is like the beginning of a rainstorm,” says the celebrated Ukrainian poet and activist in this momentous collection spanning seven years of resistance, witness and unending hope. Zhadan’s poems are pithy and prophetic, elegant and radically accessible: “No one will remember you for your silence. / No one but you can name the rivers nearby.” I say radical because Zhadan yokes the pedestrian everyday life of eastern Ukraine with the invisible orders of existence, and is spiritually attuned to a deep understanding of the forced transience and fragility of buildings and social orders in the post-Soviet east. So the “frightened soul” is “like a dog locked in the kitchen”, “carefree folks” are “like / fish [driven] by the rhythms of ground water”, trees recognise each other “like two people who once shared the same hospital room”. If Zhadan’s poems are universal, they echo the horrors of the contemporary warmongering in the Middle East as well as in eastern Europe: “They didn’t explain that death is local, / it doesn’t run out of the hospital yard, / it is of little interest to anyone, / not part of the funeral procession.”
The Many Hundreds of the Scent by Shane McCrae (Corsair, £12.99)
McCrae’s ninth collection fluidly roams between the adolescent racial realisations of his own personal history and larger mythological reimaginings of Dido, Helen of Troy and Penelope. More than any other contemporary poet, McCrae demonstrates a Keatsian negative capability in his tensile, pronged and pressurising syntax: “To live and not understand / My body, who it lives. To live / Allowed the black of the blackness of / The back of my black hand.” In McCrae’s hands, words are like tealeaves he will steep until every scent and flavour is extracted, stanzas often swirling eight or nine words back and forth with no semantic redundancies: “America because I love you still / Because I have to love you, since you’re still / Alive. But how are you alive / When your black child is dead, who was alive”. McCrae startles because the truths of his poems emerge through disciplined metre and form, giving them an air of inevitability, rather than solipsistic epiphany: “Officer how / You know I’m dead is that I seem to bow to you.” This poet cannot be paraphrased; he must be read.
Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann (Carcanet, £11.99)
Eleanor Rykener was a “transgender-like” seamstress, barmaid and sex worker in 14th century England. In this collection, Mann, a trans poet herself, forges an ecstatic mythos that imagines Eleanor as a lyric poet, as a murdered trans girl, and as the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, her near contemporaries (“I say holy, I swear there is nothing more beautiful / Than a face under pressure”). Mann moves from Eleanor’s dramatic monologues to personal mythologies, one poem a movingly restrained outcry meditating on the body and biblical instruction: “Every woman who makes herself male / Will enter the kingdom of heaven, Says one version of Christ. // What, then, of the male who makes of himself a woman?” Using transgressive linguistic play to expand the prosody of faith-based poetics, Mann’s language energises without compromising the soul’s inclination towards the afterlife: “Will my end be Garden or Glass?”
