Simon Armitsge

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

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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

The best recent poetry

 

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin; Thrums by Thomas A Clark; Sculling by Sophie Dumont; Magadh by Shrikant Verma

Philip Terry
Friday 3 October 2025

So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House, £13.99)
The title of this final book, sent to her publisher in January 2018, a week before she died, might look ironic, but with a writer like Le Guin you can’t be too sure. Her science fiction is full of journeys to different worlds, and many of these poems reference journeys too, both in this world and into the next. After the Death of Orpheus imagines Orpheus, after being torn apart by the Maenads, casually making his way down the track to the underworld, where he sees a slight figure waiting for him, Euridice. Other poems are more earthly, focusing on cattle, birds, a mouse killed by her cat, but even this smallest of creatures, as it’s carried to the trash, is given a soul by Le Guin. Cows calling for their calves from the train that takes them to the abattoir are “your sisters”. Landscapes are here too, sometimes under threat, sometimes evoked with beautiful simplicity, as in Autumn: “gold of amber / red of ember / brown of umber / all September”. Images of death in nature inevitably lead back to age and mortality, sometimes accepted as part of the natural process, elsewhere angrily resented, as in the poem about the death of Le Guin’s mother Theodora. Yet it is her own impending death which increasingly takes centre stage in the closing meditations on “extreme age”, hope mingling with despair as the body declines, approaching the end where “the wire / gets higher / and they forget / the net”.

Thrums by Thomas A Clark (Carcanet, £12.99)
A nature poet of minimalist tendencies, Clark’s career spans more than 50 years; during that time he has developed a style that by stripping away some of the hallmarks of the lyric – the personal voice, the argument, the rhyme – returns poetry to a purity of perception that gives us not poems about nature, but nature itself. The poet, all but absent, is like a sounding board for his environment, and he reports back to us about his encounters: “be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note”. There is no moulding of the material into a personal experience here, there is no epiphany, rather the body becomes a vehicle for absorbing its surroundings, and as it leans into the rain, the self dissolves into the landscape: “a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling”. Glimpses of gossamer, willowherb, deer, and owls are delicately interlaced with the language of music – the thrums of the title – which lulls us into a state of unfolding perception, caught in the moment before it is processed by thought. The poems figure environmental damage as well as beauty: “who cares for the dune gentian / who cares for the barn owl / who who who”. Yet by metamorphosing the repeated question “who cares?” into the cry of the barn owl – “who who who” – Clark shows us that by identifying with nature, of which we are always already a part, we might find a way.

Sculling by Sophie Dumont (Corsair, £12.99)
If you like getting into a canoe, but sometimes struggle getting into contemporary poetry, this could be the book you have been waiting for. The title refers to the act of propelling a boat using two oars, one in each hand, but also brings to mind skulls; boats, death and water mingle together into a heady concoction. Holding an oar, for Dumont, is like holding a pen, and in To Kayak we are reminded of the parallels between poetry and kayaking – for just as on a river we might “know a town from the echo of its bridges”, poetry likes to look at the world differently. The Curse describes Dumont’s apprenticeship at a canoe club, which she soon comes to see as a “sanctuary for the cursed”: “One man broke both his legs …Another drowned … [the coach] died at twenty by aquaplaning into a tree and I left the club”. This is a tightly knit collection, and subsequent poems continue the theme of water – there’s a stunning memory map of Exeter quay, instructions on how to right a kayak, botanies of the riverbank and a universal declaration of river rights. You won’t get wet reading this book, unless, like Dylan Thomas, you combine your poetry reading with serious drinking, but you will emerge cleansed, and reminded that human beings are 60% water.

Magadh by Shrikant Verma translated by Rahul Soni (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Like Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities, Verma explores mythical cityscapes, here conjured from the ancient Indian kingdom. Its palaces and fountains, its temples and streets, its markets and beggars, are now silent or have turned to dust, and it is inhabited by fading memories, the scents of courtesans, malevolent spirits that reanimate corpses, and revenants, who pace the ruins: “Here I see Magadh, / here it disappears – /…/ this is not the Magadh / you’ve read about / in books, / this is the Magadh / that you / like me / have lost”. This world of cadavers is conjured in a language that itself is stripped to the bare bones, as in Heaney’s bog poems, yet which paradoxically oozes life, colour and pathos. In one poem, a soldier shuttles aimlessly back and forth between ruins: “Why does he play out the same scenes / over and again?” First published in Hindi in 1984, two years before Verma’s death, and here published for the first time in the UK in Soni’s luminous translation, this haunting and haunted masterpiece resonates louder than ever in our own times, with its stark images of cities pulverised by invading armies: “… nothing / remains // except a pile of rubble / that every now and then / shouts / Who / created me”.

THE GUARDIAN