Collected in a landmark new edition, the late Irish writer’s work is attuned to wonder, replete with humanity and rooted in the tragedies of history
Fintan O’Toole
Friday 24 October 2025
A place I happen to know very well is the Flaggy Shore, a thin spit of land that sticks out into the south side of Galway Bay. In the autumn of 1992, Seamus Heaney drove up the narrow tarmacked pathway with his wife Marie, the great playwright Brian Friel and his wife Anne. He does not seem to have bothered to get out of the car, or even to stop for a few minutes to take in the scene. Because the path is usually blocked by walkers, it’s a slow drive – but still it couldn’t have taken him much more than 10 minutes. He had, as he later recalled, a “quick sidelong glimpse of something flying past”.
Triage by Claudia Rankine review – how should we respond to the world’s atrocities?
The American poet and essayist weaves memoir, fiction, criticism and lyrical lament into a tale of friendship in an age of existential crisis
Sarah Crown
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental,” writes the multi-award winning Jamaican-American poet, essayist and playwright Claudia Rankine in the disclaimer to her latest work. “Unless it isn’t.” The pretzel-logic of this statement, its assertive ambiguity, sets the tone for a book that digs directly into the question of what we are to do with the idea of truth, when the world we live in is asking us “to hold, visually and emotionally, realities we do not yet have a viable system of language for”. In Triage, Rankine borrows from her personal history and from a world whose landscape now encompasses “the rise of fascism, the implementation through deportations of the Great Replacement theory, the starvation of devastated populations subjected to war and climate change”, and uses the material she gathers to pose a simple question. When faced with realities such as these, what do you do? Do you stand, or do you fall?
The Voice of Sheila Chandra by Kazim Ali (Alice James Books, Oct. 2020)
Reviewed by AM Ringwalt
KAZIM ALI’S THE VOICE OF SHEILA CHANDRA
April 20, 2021 by AM Ringwalt
The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the latest collection of poems from the U.S.-based author Kazim Ali,concludes in question: “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer.” In a book with form blown open by subtle and sustained interrogation, the relationship between audience and performer surpasses static binary. This final question functions as a verbal haunt: who is its intended recipient? In The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the reader must comb through the text’s intersecting questions and answers—spanning three expansive poems and four hymn-like interludes. Ali is consumed by his sonic influences, so much so that his documented acts of listening generate distinct performances on the page. These poems are mediums for his listening, his embodied mortality. He writes: “To hear is to make real.”
The Poems of Seamus Heaney review – collected works reveal his colossal achievement
This article is more than 1 month old
The complete works, including previously unpublished poems and expert notes, are brought together in one volume for the first time
Philip Terry Thu 9 Oct 2025
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.
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 Dollby 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.
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-winningWith 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.
