Tom Paulin

Review

The best recent poetry – review roundup

Namanlagh by Tom Paulin; Foretokens by Sarah Howe; Maryville by Joelle Taylor; Hekate by Nikita Gill; Goatsong by Phoebe Giannisi

Namanlagh by Tom Paulin (Faber, £12.99)
It has been more than a decade – “long empty days / with the blank page” – since Paulin’s Love’s Bonfire. His 10th collection is informed by depression and the recovery from it: “if only some idea / could find its way / through enemy territory / then I’d at last begin / to look up at the sky”. His lyrics still meander down the page, but linguistic fireworks have been replaced by language that is straightforward, unadorned and more affecting for it. This also gives his reflections on the recent shifts in Northern Irish history and politics more bite. But it’s in its more private moments that the book really shines: “Heed my cadences then and live only for now. / Don’t ever bother about tomorrow. / Just pluck, today, life’s full-blooded roses”.

Foretokens by Sarah Howe (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Ten years since winning the TS Eliot prize with her debut Loop of Jade, Howe’s second collection is a reaffirmation of the keen, probing intelligence and ability to layer telling detail that underpins her poetry. Taking on the biggest of subjects – genetics, time’s relativity, becoming a parent – as well as re-examining her mother’s occluded history in Hong Kong, there is now an anger in Howe’s tonal range, which brings a pleasing sharpness to her investigations: “child of a hoarder / I am not immune / to this mania this malaise / this inherited dream / of an archive / so complete nothing / could ever hurt again”. Foretokens is a quite brilliant return.

Maryville by Joelle Taylor (Bloomsbury, £14.99)
Taylor’s latest takes the four butch lesbian characters we met in the TS Eliot-winning C+NTO & Othered Poems, and expands into a sweeping, 50-year history of lesbian culture and LGBTQ+ rights. Maryville is framed as a television series because, as Taylor says, “I want you to see us”. The device works as both the poems and screen directions surrounding them are stuffed with urgent and memorable language: “inside / women have left their breasts at home / & brought someone else’s teeth / femmes wear their hair / like a borough wears a riot”. What lingers is the tenderness Taylor has for her protagonists; she knows that liberation never comes without a cost.

Hekate by Nikita Gill (Simon & Schuster, £18.99)
The first in a trilogy, Gill’s latest verse novel is a retelling of the life of Hekate, the Greek goddess of plants, witchcraft and more. We follow her from her youth, as she discovers why she’s ended up in the underworld, and what her godly powers might be. Making use of fast-flowing tercets and prose poems, it’s a propulsive read, though at times the needs of exposition contort the poetry into flatness. However, Gill is skilled enough to slow the action and allow moments of insight to surface. In Girlhood, Hekate pauses and ponders: “the shifting sands of time took my father from my features. Is that all ageing is? Leaving things you knew and once loved behind to become something brand new?”

Goatsong by Phoebe Giannisi, translated by Brian Sneeden (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99)
Also wrestling with the Greek gods and what their myths might mean for today is Phoebe Giannisi. Goatsong is a compilation of three recent books, all united by a style that, as perhaps befits a professor of architecture, is rigorously intellectual. Yet a focus on the physical grounds the poems: “I open my mouth to speak / but my teeth clench / you a seashell / a hidden word.” Giannisi’s work does not give up its charms easily, but is worth persisting with. Its oddity and opacity put me in mind of Auden’s The Orators. In its own way, Goatsong is saying something important: “I say take me / in your embrace / in your violence / and gently / let me go”.

 Rishi Dastidar’s latest publication is A Hobby of Mine (Broken Sleep Books).

THE GUARDIAN

The Saturday poem / The Walled Garden by Sarah Howe

The Saturday poem: The Walled Garden

by Sarah Howe

Across the road, the girls quit school in threes
and fours, tripping off at speed to stations

or familiar cars, their silhouettes, slung
with shoulder bags and hockey sticks, like mules.

Remember, says the afternoon; the shut
door shudders brassily beneath my hand.

It is already dark, or darkening –
that sky above the dimming terraced rows

goes far beyond a child’s imagining.

I tread along the backstreet where the cabs

cut through behind the luminous science labs –
their sills of spider plants in yoghurt pots

among the outsize glassware cylinders
like pygmies contemplating monoliths.

You cannot walk the other side because
the walled garden meets the road direct

in pools of spangled tarmac after rain;
the open gutter choking up with leaves.

As though to listen, the colossal trees
lean out into the tungsten-haloed street.

I meet another on the road – this snail’s
slow ribbon turns the asphalt into gold.

Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Sarah Howe
Photo by Hayley Madden

Poet Sarah Howe named young writer of the year

Half-Chinese author’s debut collection Loop of Jade, exploring her dual heritage, praised by judges as ‘a work of astonishing originality’


Alison Flood
Friday 11 December 2015 12.38 GMT

Sarah Howe has been named young writer of the year for a “luminous” first collection of poetry exploring her dual English and Chinese heritage, Loop of Jade.

Howe, 32, was named winner of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year award on Thursday night. The £5,000 prize, won in the past by Zadie Smith, Robert Macfarlane and Simon Armitage, is for the best piece of fiction, non-fiction or poetry by a British or Irish writer aged 35 or under.

This year, Howe was the only poet to be shortlisted, with her collection competing with Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted novel The Year of the Runaways, Ben Fergusson’s Betty Trask award-winning historical novel The Spring of Kasper Meier, and Sara Taylor’s Baileys-nominated The Shore.

Andrew Holgate, judge and Sunday Times literary editor, said the choice of Howe was “unanimous”. “From the strongest of shortlists, they selected Loop of Jade by Sarah Howe as a work of astonishing originality, depth and scope,” he said, praising her “luminous” work.

“She is a writer always conscious of language. These are poems that are sensuous, subtle, and full of immediacy and resonance,” added Holgate.

Howe, who was born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother, told the Guardian that she was astonished to win. “The three other books were so extraordinary that I was just enjoying being shortlisted,” she said.

Loop of Jade is her first collection, and was previously shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize, and for the Forward prize for best first collection. She spent 10 years writing it, and it has “quite a strong narrative strand running through it”.

“A lot of the poems are telling the story of my mother, who was an abandoned baby in China, almost certainly given up because she was a girl. That story is entwined with the story of my own childhood in Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s told quite elliptically and in fragments – poetry is good at that, and that’s the way the story was told to me. I heard about my mother’s story in fragments.”

Her mother, she added, is pleased about the success of Loop of Jade. “I think she’s really proud; we have glancing conversations about it, where I ask a question and she answers a different question. But she tells everyone about it.”

With her win, following poet Andrew McMillan’s triumph in the Guardian first book award for his collection Physical, Howe said that “poetry seems to be having a bit of a moment in the national consciousness”.

For National Poetry Day this year, Howe’s poem Relativity was recorded by Stephen Hawking. “They say / a flash seen from on and off a hurtling train / will explain why time dilates like a perfect / afternoon,” he read, asking: “If we can think / this far, might not our eyes adjust to the dark?”

Novelist Sarah Waters, a former winner of the prize who joined Holgate along with Sunday Times chief fiction reviewer Peter Kemp on the judging panel, said that Howe was “a significant literary talent, a very special writer indeed”.

THE GUARDIAN