Them! by Harry Josephine Giles (Picador, £10.99)
The title sounds like a B-movie. We start reading and find it’s about transgender life in modern Britain, then read a bit more to find it’s quite close to a B-movie after all. Like alien invaders, the trans community are faced with hostility wherever they turn, from doctors, employers, parents and the “reasonable people”, who “suggest they do not enter the building”. Many poems record fierce cries of protest, against prejudice and ignorance, differential access to testosterone, and waiting times for a first appointment at a gender identity clinic (3-7 years). But many too respond with wit and strange beauty, as in the title poem, which creates its own subversive definitions: “The name ‘trans’ is to perform disclosure: to open a door. / Many things may come through that door.” Connecting trans identity and transitional forms in poetry, Giles celebrates an explosive efflorescence of forms, from prose poetry and erasures to dazzling visual poems, songs, photo-poems, a hilarious flow chart concerning gender reassignment protocol, and minimalist nature poems: “one foot in front of the other / until there’s a meaning / one word in front of the other / until there’s a meeting”. A bold and inimitable tour de force.
Still City by Oksana Maksymchuk (Carcanet, £12.99)
A poetic diary of the invasion of Ukraine, Maksymchuk’s first book written in English is, like life in wartime, stripped back to essentials. It captures the uncertainty with which people living in a modern European economy prepare themselves for conflict (“I bought a hat / of faux mink fur / to wear in the war”), as well as the normalisation of invasion: “The baby … used to be scared / of explosions – / now they lull her / to sleep”. Like an unflinching camera, the measured verse pans from dismembered bodies to rockets in classrooms to flattened buildings to occasional moments of snatched joy, and lives saved. In The Cat’s Odyssey, we see the face of a cat packed into a rucksack with a bubble window, “small and surprised / like the face of an astronaut”. Maksymchuk is aware of the inadequacy of language in the face of mass destruction, but she lets us see, like Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, how poetry can nevertheless help to carve out of the chaos spaces of resistance, and fleeting spaces of hope: “Where bullets now fall / blooms will rise”. Poignantly, as the war shows no sign of ending, the collection does not contain a single full stop: there can be no rest, Maksymchuk suggests, without the establishment of a lasting and just peace.
