The Slain Birds by Michael Longley (Jonathan Cape, £12)
Birds are some of poetry’s most intimate and mysterious companions: think of the owl of Athena in The Odyssey, the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Ted Hughes’s philosophical crows. The Slain Birds opens with a tawny owl killed by a motorist, later found by Longley’s granddaughters, who make “sketches in charcoal” and hug the feathers. Using ornithology as a guide, Longley’s exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat, while longing for a future for the next generation. Longley’s Midas touch never turns flora and fauna into gold, but makes foraged memories shimmer. His occasional poems capture transient places, people and events, but also a “soul-space” or “a state of mind”, as when he calls up “Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry, / The Owenadornaun’s five syllables”. Many syllables are devoted to birds in the book – the blackbird, cuckoo, flycatcher, eagle, godwit, house martin, nightingale, quail, raven, snipe and wren, to name just a few. This is counterbalanced by poignant homages to Homer, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Schubert, Mussorgsky and the great ornithologist David Cabot. The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley’s prolific repertoire, as the poet observes that “Silence that has lasted a thousand years / Is poetry of a kind”.
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón (Corsair, £12.99)
Like Longley, the US poet laureate Ada Limón is committed “to call things as they are”, believing in poetry’s resuscitative power when the name of a bird or tree is summoned. By far Limón’s most self- and world-examining book, The Hurting Kind captures the hidden, marginal forces of kindness and suffering around us. Whether it’s a groundhog stealing garden tomatoes, a belted kingfisher perching “on a transmission wire” or the fig buttercup invading the porch, Limón’s poems put non-human subjects centre stage without rendering the humans irrelevant. Instead, we’re asked “To be made whole / by being not a witness, / but witnessed”. This is not Keats’s negative capability but a poetry of full participation, of “searching for proof”. The effect is a set of astoundingly moving poems in which the self becomes an inclusive vehicle for bridging the hurting gaps between generations, ideas and living things. Limón has Elizabeth Bishop’s gift for difficult questions well disguised, and her lines ring truth not like a gong, but like the sound of wind flowing through leaves, as when the poet says “I’m wearing / my heart on my leaves” and asks “Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?” If you only read one book this autumn, make it this one.
Faust by Sandeep Parmar (Shearsman, £10.95)
Every generation deserves its own version of Faust. Echoing Goethe’s cross-genre masterpiece, Parmar combines poems with essays, diaries, memoir and searing political critique. Instead of bargaining with the devil for pleasure and knowledge, Parmar’s Faust is a female migrant striving in a foreign land against hardship and stigma, in an antiheroic story about grief and migration, land and empire, seeds and miscarriages, the price of knowledge and the cost of neoliberalism. Parmar uses the second person plural with a frightening eloquence that burns. “Go home then – / Why did you come here,” the speaker asks. Everywhere we are confronted by questions of longing and “unbelonging”. Parmar turns Goethe’s Faustian pact on its head, focusing entirely on human agency and our “countermeasure against mortality”, while investigating the complex correlations between grain and harvest, climate change and economy, dowries and gender inequalities. Her lines are visually disorienting, but her rhythms possess a fluid continuity akin to forces of resistance: “Kernels of rain or seeds of rain / is how raindrops translate / so that even the rain is not itself.” An ambitious intellectual powerhouse, the book is also lit up by many tender moments, such as “grief is not pointless, its mourning or melancholy offers something when there is nothing to show for death”. It reminds us that unmaking a myth is also a form of myth-making.
Radical Normalisation by Celia Sorhaindo (Carcanet, £11.99)
Poetry is a place for serious answers and perhaps more serious questions. This fearless, eclectic debut harnesses the interrogative force of poetry, asking “What if we dare / to be / heard?” Querying how we define a community, society, continent or memory, these poems subvert cliche and radically rethink our relationship with ordinary things and moments, as in Ground, a subtle satire about the colonial legacy of coffee-making and our obsession with different grinds and flavours. The book reads like a tug of war, in which concentrated sonnet-like poems about the role of the poet and the public vie with meandering, experimental, prosy pieces exploring personal memory and ancestral wounds. Holding these tensions is not always easy for poet or reader. Nevertheless, the book pays beautiful tribute to Bob Marley, Derek Walcott and Jean Rhys, with a freshness that stays fresh after rereading. Many poems in Radical Normalisation stand out, but none is more breathtaking than My Sister & I Are Picking Mangoes, in which a post-hurricane harvest triggers a retelling of personal, biblical and communal history: “there is no sin in / falling – grow, fall, feed ground / gut, grow again, repeat / infinitely.”
• Kit Fan’s collection The Ink Cloud Reader will be published by Carcanet in April 2023.
