Modern Poetry and Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99 each)
One of the US’s most radical and important poets has finally found a home in the UK. Modern Poetry traverses Seuss’s uncertain youth and her discovery of literature, where, as a working-class woman, she notes that her poems are “Built on the edge of tradition, they will / rarely be anthologised”. Yet despite these pressures, “Out of the spigot / streams a thirsty noncompliance. An antisong.” Frank: Sonnets tells the rackety story of Seuss’s life, from a tough childhood in Michigan, through to New York, punk, addiction, motherhood, sex and death. These loose sonnets are a virtuosic journey through the vitality of poetry itself, what Seuss calls “the only father”, showing us its raw yet brilliant capacity for truth – “Is there nobility in poems? Let’s hope not. Nobility is another place to hide.” Seuss’s writing bristles with irreverent humour and wily energy, making much else in contemporary poetry seem insipid.
That Broke Into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott (Faber, £12.99)
Scott’s formally inventive second collection reckons with trauma and its aftermath through three luminous, uneasily beautiful sets of poems. The first uses the lapidary intensity of still-life paintings to explore the speaker’s complicated vulnerability, as in Still Life With Snail, Oyster, Spoon and Shallot Vinegar: “I’m the oyster. Quivery ashen gill. Cold jelly mess of a boy shucked wide open. Invertebrate. Raw.” The second ingeniously repurposes Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress to render the lasting imprint of abuse. The final sequence uses the glowing splendour of crystals as a tool to remember “those pre-trauma days, when life was as dazzling as a piece of raw peridot”, and to look to a hard-earned future where recovery might be possible, where “There is no abyss just this / immense patience”.
