New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae (Corsair, £12.99)
This volume brings together all the poems where McCrae meshes Dante with metamorphic machines from the world of Transformers to deliver a distinctly American hell. Its Americanness may explain why the cover shows a raven straight out of Poe, but don’t be fooled – McCrae’s guide through hell is a big grey robot seagull called Law: “fucking shithead follow me”. As well as borrowings from Dante and his translators, McCrae’s eclectic mind recycles Kafka in a giant hundred-legged beetle with an orange belly, a different voice calling out of every leg: “look at me I’m a huge success you / Want to know how I got to be where / I am?” It’s refreshing to return to Dantean satire, and here the poet’s target is corporate America. God, whose squeaky voice sometimes comes out of the seagull’s belly, is “the boss”, and at the very heart of hell we meet a stream of bank executives, all queueing up to walk into a coffin where their bodies are, in a witty contrapasso, quite literally liquidated – POP! – each suit emerging with “a pink mush dripping quietly inside it”.
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha (Penguin, £14.99)
Like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. As we follow them, channel surfing and scoffing pepperoni pizza, fragments of the past fly around us like swirling leaves in a tempest – a Bruce Willis film projected on to a skyscraper, African herders caught up in a conflict over water, Freud lecturing on the interpretation of dreams. It’s a dizzying experience, but anchoring it all is the recurrent theme of a 1976 hijacking: “Air France Flight 139 will depart from Tel Aviv … A German will ask for the freedom of forty Palestinians detained in Israel”. The plane is diverted to Uganda, triggering a train of events that will lead to the young Makoha’s flight from the country. Returning to this primal scene that has so radically altered his life, Makoha takes us inside the cockpit, where the pilot has a gun pressed against his head, as well as into the American embassy, where people fret about the disruption to international trade, and through meditations on flight and falling, from Icarus plunging towards the ocean to the fall of Rome. “I was ready to connect history to art,” he writes in one of his teasing footnotes, “the way moonlight connects the sky to the sea. Or maybe I was just hedging my bets.”
