Poukahangatus by Tayi Tibble (Penguin, £10.99)
In Vampires Versus Werewolves, the poet remembers schooldays of “brown boys running round topless during PE”; when white girls take them home, it is “to see if parents would bare their teeth”. The role reversal is typical of the fairytales of youth in the Aotearoan/New Zealand poet’s debut collection. Tibble writes wittily of the hunger games of adolescence, with needy boys crying wolf (those beasts again) while “in reverse you cry sheep and / nobody believes your bleating”. Identities are assumed and discarded (“there is a dark-skinned darkness in me / I wear her like a little black dress”), and form a central focus of the autofictional long poem Shame. “Tell me, am I navigating correctly?” Tibble asks in Identity Politics. Her worries are misplaced: however lost their youthful personas, these wise poems know exactly where they are heading.
Rookie: Selected Poems by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, £12.99)
Bird’s debut was published when she was 15, and stands up sufficiently well for 15 pages from it to appear in Rookie. Bird’s narratives often proceed at breakneck speed, like the flies in Detox with their “one second” life expectancy. Doubling is a strong theme, as in Mary-Jane, who was “born as identical twins”, or Kissing, with its “two teardrops racing down opposite faces / of the same hypocrite”. In Nancy and the Torpedo, from the Forward prize-winning The Air Year, Nancy hugs a torpedo and explains to her partner “Can’t you see I’m exploding for the both of us?” These are poems that go off like a great big rocket in the sky.
One Language by Anastasia Taylor-Lind (Smith|Doorstop, £10.99)
An Afghan refugee falls to his doom from the undercarriage of a plane: “Like Bruegel’s Icarus, he touches down with a splash”. As a photojournalist who works in war zones, Taylor-Lind uses aesthetic distance as a spell against harm, as when the poet and a colleague role play their deaths: “We took it in turns who was doing the dying / and who was doing the cradling.” On more personal occasions, distance collapses into something rawer, as in the elegies for the poet’s father and poems on domestic violence in the book’s second half. Ultimately it is Taylor-Lind’s eye for the telling detail that stands out, as when hair salons in Nagorno-Karabakh in the South Caucasus close and “women’s roots are as long as the war, a grey inch for each month”.
Sonnets for Albert by Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
“My father died with his mouth open – / gasping for air”, we read in Shame. After much silence and absence in life, the poet’s father is painstakingly restored in death in a book-length “calypso sonnet” sequence. Albert is a rogue, and encounters with him often take place on the run, as when a brother of the poet catches him at the wheel of a van in traffic in Trinidad. Albert responds by badmouthing his brother to the poet: “they way he does talk proper English, Tony, / he talking more English than you!” Others have respectability, but Albert has style and mystique. Joseph’s relationship with his father is profoundly ambivalent, but Sonnets for Albert movingly makes peace with his shade: Albert has “made his cycle”, an aunt tells the poet, “and that was all that was required of him”.
High Desert by André Naffis-Sahely (Bloodaxe, £10.99)
“There is no better backdrop / for the mirage / of permanent boom times than the desert.” As landscapes go, deserts are more interchangeable than most, and Naffis-Sahely’s visions of dereliction are eerily arid and universal at once. Identities are layered one on top of another as the poet moves from continent to continent; the seal of the Islamic Republic is “planted atop / the Shah’s lion” on his father’s passport in The Last Communist. Naffis-Sahely has edited a book on Michael Hofmann and, like Hofmann, writes poems imbued with the density of good short stories. Ierapetra, The Train to St Petersburg and The Year of One Thousand Fires are full of civilised world-weariness. This is fierce writing too: litanies of the lost, dispatches from desperate outposts and borders. “True migrants ought to be buried upright / like the Kurdish warriors of old”, we read in Folie à Trois: in an inert and supine world, these are impeccably upright poems.
