Come Here to This Gate by Rory Waterman (Carcanet, £11.99)
Waterman’s fourth collection opens with a series of elegies. “The sheep-tracks of your mind were worn to trenches”, he writes as alcoholic dementia takes hold of his father and language deserts him. Rueful, tender and utterly scarifying, these are among the very best father elegies since Michael Hofmann’s Acrimony. A central section addresses the upheavals of midlife: invited by a social media site to revisit his memories, he decides he would rather not (“No. Click the little X again. / Forget that we were ever there”). With his carefully weighed retrospection, Waterman is the most Hardyesque of modern poets, forever sniffing out the might-have-beens beneath mere actuality. Never merely solemn, Come Here to This Gate is a wise and deeply satisfying book.
Are You There by Samantha Fain (Bad Betty, £10.99)
Readers may recognise the title from the Netflix “idle” screen. Its combination of technology and vague distress is in keeping with the explorations of the self on show in this wittily knowing work. “In poems, we echolocate / the feelings”, Fain writes, thinking of whales and feeling her way uncertainly into the space where “a poem exists / as several selves”. Fain coins the neologism “delinger” for her attempts to overcome inertia, but the bracketing of authenticity and pain represents a potent threat to wellbeing (“In aching I am mine”). The exclamation mark in “Some Sundays I want to live a heartless life!” recalls the effervescence of Frank O’Hara, but even as Fain titles a poem Against Feeling she remains aware that “Grief is fact”. “It’s easy, deleting my way out of myself” comes the conclusion, as she backs into the limelight of these drolly personable poems.
Silver by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Faber, £12.99)
“The first and final poem is the sun”, writes Phillips in the first and again in the final poem of Silver. Dialogues with Wallace Stevens, Wordsworth and Coleridge situate the collection within a reimagining of the Romantic sublime. “What forms / First, a thing or its form?” Phillips asks, holding out for a space beyond the controlling ego, somewhere poetry can be “the breath your breath takes before you breathe”. The human sphere and the godly zone of art jostle uneasily. Commemorating a bard’s rash challenge to a god, The Immortal Marsyas begins “O silver-lyred Apollo” before ending, at the foot of the page, “Gimme that”. The centrepiece of the collection is the longer poem Child of Nature, a freewheeling and delightful ars poetica that compares Matthew Arnold to Pink Floyd, and in which Phillips pronounces poetry “séance and silence and science”.
All the Good Things You Deserve by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker, £12.99)
“It’s nice being alone / not having to worry about my arse over the bar stool like dali’s clocks”, Feeney writes in Darling / I Have Written You a Surprise Poem About Love. Like those barstools, these poems have an over-the-top quality. In the typical Feeney poem, desire is the shot and bathos the chaser (“Love, laugh, live, whatever the fuck”). Unfortunately, the long title poem is far from the strongest thing in the book. More affecting is a wistful piece where Feeney imagines a couple buying convenience food at a garage before a late-night film, before inserting herself as their hypothetical garage-server (“I’ve done those shifts”). The caustic love poems that show Feeney at her best spill down the page with the energy of rushing tides that “cannot / tell if they were once the river / or are now the sea”.
Poems 2016-2024 by JH Prynne (Bloodaxe, £25)
“Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand,” announces a character in Beckett’s Molloy, a phrase that would fit well on the cover of JH Prynne’s Poems 2016-2024. While one might have expected an update of Prynne’s already monumental Poems, the arrival of more than 700 pages of new work is a remarkable turn of events. A good place to start is Snooty Tipoffs, in which Prynne enters a wholly unexpected Noël Coward phase (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”). (Ab)normal service is resumed in other, less forthcoming sequences, with titles including Torrid Auspicious Quartz and At Raucous Purposeful. As for what it’s all about, we are probably best off showing “no anger now, childish first near finish /up in debt beyond reason or meaning”. Here is a book to keep us busy for a very long time.
