WHAT by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, £16.99)
A big-hearted poet of boundless humour and unmistakable style, Clarke has written some of the catchiest contemporary ballads about social injustice. Many poems in WHAT satirise modern dysfunctional Britain with deadly wit. In Clown Town, he captures the forgotten post-industrial landscape that went “downhill from the 70s boom” and is now filled with “soft shoe shuffle home”. Opposite Clown Town, Dream Home Ghetto depicts rampant soulless developments where “The whole town’s on holiday” and “There is a social roadblock / Where the brakes are set to screech / You can keep Utopia Parkway / And stick your Cameo Beach”.From nail bars to “discount chops”, Clarke uses his dandyish rhymes to shed a critical light on many kinds of jarring social division. Hailed as the original “people’s poet”, his down-to-earth poetry can be eye-catching and moving, ironic and nonsensical. The lighter pieces include a poem for Sir Tom Jones, who is “Back in town in the black Rolls-Royce / The funky hunky housewives’ choice”.
Girls That Never Die by Safia Elhillo (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
In times of renewed Islamophobia and misogyny, Elhillo’s searching poetry cuts through the fog of prejudice. Writing as an investigative memoirist, Elhillo peels off the complex layers of intergenerational scars to give voice to Muslim women who have experienced sexual and emotional traumas: “Because I am their daughter my body is not mine. / I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled. Raised / to bleed in some man’s bed.” With its Sudanese-American background, her poetry questions the troubling constructs of identity, body, language and nation with an intelligence that is both playful and lethal: “I say they who named my country & don’t know to whom / I refer – British, Ottoman, Egyptian, crossing the threshold / & declaring, This land. Black.” Mixing tenderness and profanity, Elhillo challenges man-made taxonomies, hierarchies and customs – rank and resilient, the book fearlessly illuminates dark contemporary places.
Skin by David Harsent (Faber, £12.99)
An architect of sound, Harsent has built a haunting body of work unlike that of any other poet of our time. Formally edgy and musically hypnotic, his poetry over five decades – often cast in intricate narrative sequences – unearths our most intimate desires for people and places, combining a photographic memory with the taste of dream and improvisation. Skin, his 13th collection, contains 10 memorable sequences about silence, our proximity to the dead, and the deep-seated struggle between light and darkness. At its heart are our debts to pleasure and sorrow as we age. “They think you think / you are old beyond your years”, a speaker proclaims, “Words given over to silence; images that won’t (will never) hold.” Harsent holds lines and people together in “a fierce harmony”; his restlessly inventive poetic forms bear “a fugitive geometry” that houses the enigma of the “seen-unseen, / self-unself, gone into a hare and gone to ground”. The book’s sheer metaphysical reach recalls Shakespeare’s dialectical sonnets, Wallace Stevens’s philosophical soliloquies, and Beckett’s ghostly investigations of love, pain, and silence. “The skylight empty of sky”, Harsent observes, “A line of song etched into the bone.”
Absence by Ali Lewis (Cheerio, £11)
An atmosphere of all-consuming emptiness hangs heavily in Absence as Lewis unpacks the absurdity of human drama with intellectual curiosity and a muted sense of humour. “Everything’s so insistently next to everything else”, writes Lewis in Leisure on a Red Background, a deadpan poem named after Fernand Léger’s vibrant yet desolate postwar artwork. Many ekphrastic poems in the book use paintings as portals for emotional release, as in The Raising of Lazarus (after Duccio): “Since I’ve been reckoning with grief, / I’ve been noticing trees: / the absent way they slip / their leaves, as if falling into sleep.” There is tenderness in Lewis’s taut lyric voice, but also a sense of the limits to redescription. Alongside strange retellings of Genesis and Exodus, the book investigates a love-hate relationship, as in the formally crafty Hotel, which records how “She hated the way he repeated himself / along long corridors like a bad hotel carpet”. Absence is a miscellaneous debut unafraid of confronting “a no-shape no-thing: the unthinkable / after imagining”.
• Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection is The Ink Cloud Reader.
