As the mist leaves no scar
by Leonard Cohen
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
When wind and hawk encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter,
Then turn, then fall to sleep.
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure,
When one is gone and far.
Steer your way
by Leonard Cohen
Steer your way through the ruins of the Altar and the Mall
Steer your way through the fables of Creation and the Fall
Steer your way past the Palaces that rise above the rot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday
Such as Fundamental Goodness and the Wisdom of the Way
Steer your heart, precious heart, past the women whom you bought
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your path through the pain that is far more real than you
That has smashed the Cosmic Model, that has blinded every View
And please don’t make me go there, though there be a God or not
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
They whisper still, the injured stones, the blunted mountains weep
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap
And say the Mea Culpa, which you’ve gradually forgot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
Steer your way, O my heart, though I have no right to ask
To the one who was never never equal to the task
Who knows he’s been convicted, who knows he will be shot
Year by year
Month by month
Day by day
Thought by thought
The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time
Baudelaire introduced ordinary objects into poetry – likening the sky to a pan lid – and by doing so revolutionised poetic language. Likewise, Seamus Heaneyintroduced Northern Irish vernacular into the English lyric, peppering his lines with words like glarry, the Ulster word for muddy; kesh, from Irish ceis, a wickerwork causeway; and dailigone, “daylight gone” or dusk, from Ulster-Scots. It is this that gives his writing a mulchy richness and cultural resonance that remain unique in contemporary poetry. One of the key poems in North (1975) is a version of Baudelaire’s The Digging Skeleton, to which Heaney brings an Irish flavour – the skeletons dig the earth “like navvies”. It’s especially rich as digging for Heaney is also a metaphor for writing, while the archaeological metaphor resonates with the darkly symbolic bog poems.
James Schuyler at the door of his apartment in Florence, Italy, May 1948. Photo: Chester Kallmann, courtesy Ridenour family
The celebrated New York School poet and Pulitzer Prize–winner James Schuyler is the subject of Nathan Kernan’s new biography, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler. Kernan narrates the wild turns in the poet’s life with great skill, from his peripatetic youth, through his years in the influential circle of W. H. Auden, on to his critical friendships with poets and artists such as John Ashbery, Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and Fairfield Porter. Here Raymond Foye, a friend of Schuyler’s (and the poet’s literary executor), talks with Kernan about the genesis of the project and some of the breakthroughs and challenges he encountered in its construction.
Bob Kaufman was, it’s often said, a poet of the streets, a poet whose life and work manifested a deep knowledge of its nooks and crannies, its hustles, its dogged, imaginative techniques of survival, and its flashes of surreal poetic clarity. The street is a place of protest, but also of homelessness, of addiction, of those cast outside without access to shelter, property, labor, the legitimized forms of social life. In moments of social unrest, the street comes alive, as autonomous zones are established and the police—that permanent army of occupation—are pushed back. But the street is also where the crowd splinters into many voices, heard and unheard. Like so much of the life of the street, Kaufman’s work has fallen through the cracks. In his lifetime, Kaufman published just three full-length books: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness (1965), Golden Sardine (1967), and The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981). Kaufman lived a peripatetic existence predominantly around San Francisco’s North Beach bohemia, with a spell in New York’s Lower East Side. He died at the early age of sixty in 1986.
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| Ilustration by Golriz Rezvani |
Sleep is the ax, I’ve heard men say,
That chops one third of life away.
Well, put my third upon the block;
I need eight hours by the clock.
The joy of house parties, an email to an estate agent, tales from a billionaire’s dolls and more
In 2024 politics has been inescapable for many poets, a retreat from the world impossible, particularly from the Israel-Gaza war. This has been especially true for the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, whose[...] (Out-Spoken) suggests the impossibility of fully articulating the effect of the pain and destruction, but also a yawning absence now and in the future: “From time to time, language dies. / It is dying now. / Who is alive to speak it?” Meanwhile, in Bluff (Chatto & Windus) Danez Smith delivers an “anti poetica”, grounded in the protests after the murder of George Floyd, exploring the limits of poetry to effect real change.
Rachael Allen’s second collection, God Complex (Faber), uses the twin poles of a relationship breakdown and environmental collapse to paint a picture of a crumbling Britain, where “sense slides into oblivion”. Joe Hill Makes His Way Into the Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions) is focused in its anger. She refashions the words of American countercultural poet Kenneth Patchen, an inspiration of the Beats, into blasts against the depredations austerity has caused, while also finding redemption amid the chaos.
A number of poets experimented with novel-like narratives, daring in their structures and subject matter. Notable among these is Ella Frears’s Goodlord (Rough Trade Books), a book-length email to an estate agent that spirals into a hypercharged series of Prufrockian reminiscences about the horrible reality of renting in the 21st century: “These cursèd rooms, // they sap! they sap! they sap!” Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf(Dialogue) is similarly playful; and by giving voice to the dolls in the collection of a reclusive billionaire, she smuggles in deep truths about feminism and slavery.
In a strong year for debut collections, two stood out in particular. Monster by Dzifa Benson (Bloodaxe) dazzles in its range, technique and imagination, while Camille Ralphs’s After You Were, I Am(Faber) brings a medieval spirituality vibrantly into the modern world.
On a melancholic note, British poetry lost some exceptional talents this year. John Burnside’s final collection, Ruin, Blossom (Jonathan Cape), brings typical acuity to an awareness of what is lost with time passing: “Let us remember / the stillborn: how they // cede their places here / with such good grace // that no one ever speaks of them // again.” Kathryn Bevis’s The Butterfly House (Seren) was written through a late-stage cancer diagnosis, and is vivid with sticky metaphors and plainspoken declarations of love.
The anthology I turned to most is Poems as Friends: The Poetry Exchange 10th Anniversary Anthology (Quercus), which collects 50 conversations from the popular podcast, suggesting how poems can provide comfort, wisdom and insights into how to live. It’s a beautiful tribute to the late Fiona Bennett, who came up with the idea and did so much to bring poetry to a wider audience.
Two of the UK’s most lauded poets delivered magnificent capstones to their careers. Both Wendy Cope’s and Mimi Khalvati’s Collected Poems (Faber and Carcanet, respectively) provide acres of proof of their brilliance, and their unique ability to turn language into lyric poems that beguile. I also enjoyed how Victoria Chang uses the paintings of Agnes Martin as a jumping-off point for her existential ruminations in the Forward prize-winning With My Back to the World(Little, Brown).
This year also saw the posthumous publication of Adam (Faber), the first collection by Gboyega Odubanjo, who died in 2023. Inspired by the discovery of the body of a black boy in the River Thames, the poems form a chain of extended thoughts on what it is to belong – and whether that is even possible – when you come from “so far east it’s west to another man”. Blending English, Pidgin and Yoruba, Odubanjo’s language is by turns laser sharp, expansive and indelible: “there is nothing left to dig a grave / wait and enjoy life / wait and bury me / your touch is life / your gapped teeth please me / the story is yours”. Finishing the book leaves you mesmerised, and keening for what would have come next.
