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.
Conflicted Copy by Sam Riviere (Faber, £12.99)
While many writers are fretting about how AI might affect their future careers, Sam Riviere is already writing in conflicted collaboration with the open source network GPT-2 to explore the new possibilities unleashed for poetry. The poems explore machine learning and the world of the poet in the age of algorithmic reproduction. Pink Poem reads like a machine trying to work out what poetry is: “quite interesting and gave the impression you / had to repeat in order to understand”. True Mode shows us the poet, now freed from the task of writing, able at last to wander, like Wordsworth, “into the open air / and see what’s waiting … ” Riviere’s machine language, often delightfully clunky, also has its magical aspects, unplugging and rebooting our perceptual apparatus as we look over the shoulder of machines clumsily figuring us out: “Some people believe a part of themselves, the part that is / often called the ‘core’, can be transmitted from parent to / child through the biological connection, usually a type / of psychic or genetic mutation”. “Every revolution in poetry is … a return to common speech,” TS Eliot once wrote. In turning poetry towards machine language, Riviere quietly kicks off a poetic revolution for our time.
The Collected Poems by Roger McGough (Viking, £25)
This triumphant anthology stuns with its sheer variety, spanning Mersey-soaked 60s sequences to playful pandemic poems. There is something here for everyone, from meet-my-folks verse and a spiralling visual poem to be stitched on the inside of a beret to a review of The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse in the style of Georges Perec, written entirely without the letter “e”, alongside list poems, cut-ups, parodies, anti-nuclear poems, and satirical send-ups of the nanny state: “Fallen leaves will be outlawed / and persons found in possession / of conkers imprisoned without trial”. Many pieces, such as Stinging in the Rain or Hash Wednesday, start with a play on words; others focus on estranged love or the death of friends, as in the slow-motion elegy on the death of John Berryman: “We open on a frozen river /… / From somewhere above he jumps / We see the shadow first / seeping into the ice”. In Bob Dylan and the Blue Angel, the poet bumps into a disconsolate Dylan in a Liverpool bar. When Dylan asks for career advice, McGough suggests ditching the acoustic; the rest is history. If you’ve only room for one book when you go on holiday this summer, take this – but be warned, you won’t be able to fit it in your hand luggage.
Sleepers Awake by Oli Hazzard (Carcanet, £12.99)
Taking its title from a Bach cantata, Hazzard’s dizzying collection plunges us into a world of hazy consciousness caught in full dreamflight that owes much to Ashbery and Joyce. Referents here are as slippery as eels: one moment we are building Lego towers with a young child, another we’re dialoguing with a Renaissance poet, then we’re cloud watching, meditating on a painting by Nicole Eisenman or rolling giant stones across a landscape on felled trees. Plugged directly into the mind of the poet, we’re sometimes witness to the birth of the poem as it unfolds: “Here in pose / a pear appears // I put that in / to make it / more hummy”. Elsewhere we see Hazzard playfully wondering what a poem might actually be for: “are we to piece / together a spillage // on the ‘still page’ // so / an ache / still may take // place / in public?” These poems are not “about” life, observed from afar; the poems themselves are life, distracted, irritated, stressed out, tender, displaced, scrolling and multitasking. Strange and ambitious, Sleepers Awake takes us to places we all know, but had forgotten were there.
