Regardless by Adelaide Love

 

Ilustration by Golriz Rezvani

Regardless 

by Adelaide Love

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.

 

Review

The best poetry books of 2024

This article is more than 11 months old

The joy of house parties, an email to an estate agent, tales from a billionaire’s dolls and more

Rishi Dastidar

Tue 3 Dec 2024

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.

 Photograph: Faber

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).

Caleb Femi’s second collection, The Wickedest (4th Estate), confirms him as one of our best chroniclers of what it is like to live now. Over vignettes set in house parties, he communicates the urgency and vitality of finding community, bliss and joy through a hedonism keenly aware of its own short shelf life. His visual experience as a director shows in the precision of his images: “The light is pinstriped and scarce / but your eyes see everything: particles in the air – colliding nebulas, / the sandcastle in the centre of the dance. / One yout tells you that every grain contains / the memory of a night”.

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.

THE GUARDIAN

 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow in the Post

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is one of the most American of our poets. We offer some of his poems, which appeared in the Post of the 1840s.

Jeff Nilsson

“Henry Wadsworth Longfellow… could sing. He could tell stories about America. Maybe his form were imported, but they were tempered and transformed by his fantastic world.”

 

Simon Armitsge

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

This article is more than 4 years old

The Owl and the Nightingale, translated by Simon Armitage; Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück; Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles; Five Books by Ana Blandiana; The sea is spread and cleaved and furled by Ahren Warner

Fiona Sampson

Fri 1 Oct 2021 12.00 BST

The Owl and the Nightingale translated by Simon Armitage (Faber, £14.99)
This new work follows Simon Armitage’s earlier versions of Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in making the creative case for the readability of long Middle English poems. The Owl and the Nightingale is a comic disputation in 900 rhyming couplets: the joke – that the different orders of bird lack mutual respect, just like humans from different communities – has plenty of time to wear thin, especially as this translation has to work with the poem’s rural setting, which could appear to contemporary perspectives to lack edge. That we want to keep reading is thanks largely to Armitage’s way with language. Plain-speaking and laconic, it retains the metre and rhyme scheme of the original, while making it sound easy: it is not. This thoroughly poetic feat, rather than Faber’s somewhat twee illustrations or the arch self-references, ensures this graceful, elegant translation is a success.

Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück (Carcanet, £12.99)
A slim volume of just 15 pieces, but like all the Nobel laureate’s work, it punches above its apparent weight. Glück has always been a fastidiously exact truth-teller; her lucid poems pretend to a plainness that’s really the simplicity of something more fully worked out than the rest of us can manage. It is a hallmark of late, great writing, as is the courage to go into the dark: “Downward and downward and downward and downward / is where the wind is taking us.” This new collection once again examines close relationships without the sweetener of correct sentiment, recording the universal stages of human life through a woman’s experience. We’re back in the stylised, half-dreamed Glück landscapes that are rural equivalents of an Edward Hopper painting, and back with her astonishing poetry, as “the world goes by, / All the worlds, each more beautiful than the last”.

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles (Picador, £10.99)
Deep Wheel Orcadia is a book of astonishments. The first is that this is a verse novel: a kind of storytelling that mainstream poetry for adults often resists. What such resistances overlook is just how much the form can contain, given poetry’s capacity to say many things at once. It threads together questions of identity and belonging, alongside examinations of deep space and Orkney, in a single concisely yet scintillatingly told tale. Giles also makes language shift like the stormy Orcadian seas. Every page of this bilingual book contains both conventional stanzaic verse in “a poetic register of the Orkney tongue”, and a prose-poem version where the same material is retold in an idiomatic English that packs in, and unpacks, the many meanings of the Orcadian. When, for example, “stoor” becomes “stormstrifestrainspeeddust”, or “Øyvind birls a pod in his lang / fingers an waatches the ship link” is rendered as “Øyvind whirlrushdancespins a pod in his long fingers and watches the ship glidetorestconnect”, English itself is returned to the reader as “something strange and rich”.

Five Books by Ana Blandiana, translated by Paul Scott Derrick and Viorica Patea (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
The Romanian Ana Blandiana is one of Europe’s greatest living poets, and she’s well served by this substantial volume containing five previously untranslated collections. Ranging across her writing life, they create a layered portrait of a complex yet consistent poetic identity. The collection opens with poems of resistance to the Ceausescu regime’s tyranny, which in 1984 electrified Romanian society and became its first samizdat literature. There are also two collections written under Ceausescu, in which women’s embodied experiences become overlaid with and symbolise national experience. The Architecture of Waves, published in 1990 when Blandiana was 48, was her first book to appear uncensored. Also included here are two collections from the past five years, one a book-length exequy for her husband. Its title, Variations on a Given Theme, economically encapsulates the repetitive nature of mourning: and economy and focus are the hallmarks of this unflinching work of witness, to realities both intimate and international.

The sea is spread and cleaved and furled by Ahren Warner (Prototype, £12)
The brilliant writer and artist Ahren Warner makes a welcome return with this verse sequence with photographs. Warner’s fiercely intelligent earlier collections were often “furled” tight indeed, as if clenched against the forces of idiocy or blandness. Now, as he reports on a wild odyssey through the club scene of southeast Europe and beyond, his writing expands with conversation and self-talk, incident and image. Decadent but full of self-disclosure, it’s at once sexy, intellectual and self-aware. “She’s not here, i say. i know, i say, but the tears streaking my face are real, i say //and so is the way my neurons are shaking with something i have, in the past, called, love.” This story of an affair is a messy, disturbing triumph in the traditions of Arthur Rimbaud and John Berryman: how Le bateau ivre or The Dream Songs would read if they’d been written today. It too could be the anthem of a generation.

THE GUARDIAN