Visions of war … Ishion Hutchinson. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson; The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi; Housebreak by Shareen K Murayama; Cowboy by Kandace Siobhan Walker; Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil

Rebecca Tamás
Friday 3 November 2023

School of Instructions by Ishion Hutchinson (Faber, £12.99)

This visionary work of memory, elegy and loss captures the experiences of West Indian soldiers who fought for the British in the first world war. The collection weaves together the terrors of war with the terrors of imperialism, using dizzyingly original language and brutally impactful rhythms to create a tapestry of suffering, courage and struggle: “Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud … Caliban mud. Cannibal mud.” These experiences filter into the book’s second narrative, the life of Godspeed, a schoolboy living in Jamaica in the 1990s. Hutchinson subtly outlines the ways in which colonial force was perpetuated by language, English culture thrust into young minds with its own kind of violence: “Godspeed skulled elocution day … and so missed the shrieking out of ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.’ Bayonet fighting amid the cactus hedges …” The collection sings of those who “have no memorial who are perished as though they had never been” – reanimating their lives within the deathless, vivid fabric of poetry.

The Wrong Person to Ask by Marjorie Lotfi (Bloodaxe, £10.99)

Lotfi’s imagistically rich debut collection moves from her childhood in Iran, where her family were uprooted by the revolution, to her youth in America and her current home in Scotland. Lotfi is sensitively attuned to the painful dislocation of self that can come from moving between different nations – “In my dream she asks me to say it again, / Lotfi, spell it out, before turning me away … I push through the exit / and walk home in rain to a house / that isn’t mine, in a country that isn’t mine.” Again and again her radiant language turns over the loss of family intimacy and identity caused by political upheaval and violence: “Ask about Ameh, her arms around my skinny frame, / or how I can have forgotten Farsi and the sound / of her voice bidding me each night to let the day go.” Lotfi’s book mourns these losses and separations, while at the same time rendering the possibilities of a capacious, multifaceted sense of belonging: “And what is home if not the choice – / over and over again – to stay?”

Housebreak by Shareen K Murayama (Bad Betty, £10)
A book of many griefs, personal and intimate as well as political and societal. The poet’s loss of her mother, first to dementia and then to death, is explored with arresting dark humour and piercing clarity: “I tell myself I’m not going to write another dead mom poem. / Nevertheless she arrives, promptly. In a care home fisted with careless bags of food or a spam musubi. / A comfort offering in reverse.” The book also addresses the trauma caused by hate crimes against Asian-Americans during the pandemic: “How you failed at making yourself smaller / in the pocket of your seat on your way to work this morning … nasty people should stay in fucking Asia.” Yet in the face of pain and prejudice, it remains fierce and bristling with life: “I have faith in folktales, like my grandmother’s story. / Anyone could be saved or eaten. Their tongues cut out.”

Cowboy by Kandace Siobhan Walker (Cheerio, £11)
This debut is hilarious, moving and dazzlingly new. Running through topics as varied as love, gentrification, neurodivergence, gender, queerness, death, life in the internet age, low wage jobs and capitalist exploitation, these poems create a gloriously sharp picture of modern millennial life and struggle: “Communism was cool again, Instagram was attractive. / Students were in occupation. Sad boys were novelties, / sad girls aspirational.” Walker’s greatest strengths are her beautifully odd imagery (“Nighttime’s religious core is wherever you / touch me; I’m absolutely dolphins. I’m molten”) and the mordant, painfully dark humour of her poetic voice. “What a beautiful day to have a miscarriage! … / There’s the beginning of you. I bleed / through my pyjamas – there’s the end.” Cowboy marks the entry of a significant and exciting new voice into British poetry.

Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil (Prototype, £12)
This hybrid work of poetry and prose from the TS Eliot prize winning author is as fresh, dangerous and thrilling as the open road followed by protagonist Laloo, a cyborg traveller who is both girl and mother, immigrant and settler. Laloo hitchhikes through the bewitching yet hostile American landscape, reflecting on her own complicated pasts in England and India, and her fractured relationship with herself. She is searching for the transformation or escape that journeying might provide: “I didn’t want to go home … A beautiful hazard: to go and keep going.” In these capacious and innovative poems of global shift and radical monstrosity, it is the brilliant potency of Kapil’s images that holds the threads of the narrative together: “At the highway exit, the hitchhiker is all bones and a red T-shirt in the ruby red tail lights … Cars whizzing by in a frenzy of rubies and diamonds.”

THE GUARDIAN