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 

 

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

Pablo Neruda / The Fickle One

THE FICKLE ONE

By Pablo Neruda


My eyes went away from me 
following a dark girl who went by.

She was made of black mother-of-pearl, 
made of dark-purple grapes, 
and she lashed my blood 
with her tail of fire.

After them all
I go.

A pale blonde went by 
like a golden plant 
swaying her gifts. 
And my mouth went 
like a wave 
discharging on her breast 
lightningbolts of blood.

After them all 
I go.

But to you, without my moving, 
without seeing you, distant you, 
go my blood and my kisses, 
my dark one and my fair one, 
my tall one and my little one, 
my broad one and my slender one, 
my ugly one, my beauty,

made of all the gold 
and of all the silver, 
made of all the wheat 
and of all the earth, 
made of all the water 
of the sea waves, 
made for my arms, 
made for my kisses, 
made for my soul.

Pablo Neruda / Entrance into wood

Entrance into wood

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Entrada a la madera

Scarcely with my reason, with my fingers
with slow waters indolently swamped,
I fall into the realm of forget-me-nots,
into a tenacious air of mournfulness,
a decayed forgotten hall
and a cluster of bitter clover.

I fall into the shadows, to the core,
of shattered things,
and I see spiders, and I graze on thickets
of secret inconclusive woods,
and I pace through soaked, uprooted fibers
at the living heart of matter and silence.

Oh lovely matter, oh rose of dry wings,
as I drown I cling to your petals
my feet are burning with fatigue,
I kneel in your harsh cathedral
beating my lips with an angel.

It is because I am myself
faced with your color of world,
faced with your pale dead swords,
faced with your united hearts,
faced with your silent multitude.

I am the one facing your wave of dying fragrances,
wrapped in autumn and resistance;
about to take a funeral journey
along the ridges of yellow scars;
I with my lamentations that have no genesis
hungry, sleepless, alone
arriving at your mysterious essence.

I see the course of your petrified currents,
the growth of frozen, interrupted hands.
I hear your oceanic vegetation
rustling - shaken by night and fury
and I feel the leaves dying inward - to the very core
fusing their green substances
to your abandoned immobility.

Pores, veins, rings of sweetness,
weight, silent temperatures,
arrows piercing your fallen soul,
beings asleep in your thick mouth
shreds of sweet consumed pulp,
ashes filled with extinguished souls,
gather to me, to my measureless dream,
fall into my bedroom where night falls
and endlessly falls like broken water
and bind me to your life and to your death

and to your docile substances,
to your dead neutral doves,
and let us make fire, and silence, and sound,
and let us burn, and be silent, and bells."

Anna Zilahi / Delta

Anna Zilahi: Delta

"The Hotel" of Cormorans - Hotelul cormoranilor (Photo: Ioan Cepaliga)

"Where does river meet sea; does it conclude / or go no further? The house is standing, the house still stands," – one poem by Anna Zilahi, in Owen Good's translation.

29th November, 2023

 

TS Eliot and Groucho Marx

Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot Were Pen Pals

A glimpse at the correspondence — and one awkward dinner — of the iconic Jewish comedian and the brilliant, anti-Semitic poet.

By Ted Mann

November 5, 2011

Lee Siegel commemorates a new volume of T.S. Eliot's collected letters by noting a series of exchanges that aren't included in the book: the missive exchanged by Eliot and Groucho Marx, two sharply different men fascinated with each other.

Szabina Ughy: Explanation (Poem)

Photo by Gábor Nagy

since loving in Magyar is so complex / anyhow, let this be a simple, / touristy, Budapest morning. - Szabina Ughy's poem Explanation translated by Peter Sherwood.

4th May, 2021

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EXPLANATION

 

It was a beautiful night,

he says, and I say nothing.

For the rest we can share no words,

his English, like mine, being so-so.

I can see how he imagines me to be,

fingers and mouth I mould around him,

since loving in Magyar is so complex

anyhow, let this be a simple,

touristy, Budapest morning.  

Then the first 49 tram, the Danube,

the streetlights going out, one by one.

As the outlines become clearer

one phrase haunts me: sombre absolution,

confining me in words, comforting,

sombre absolution, an impassive threat

that for all this I have at least

a few borrowed words.

 

Translated by Peter Sherwood

 

Szabina Ughy was born in Ajka in 1985. She is the author of two poetry collections, Outer Prosthesis (Külső protézis, 2011) and Walks on the Outskirts (Séták peremvidéken, 2015), as well as the novel The Taste of Pomegranate (A gránátalma ize, 2018), released by Orpheusz Publishers. Graduate of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, she has published work in various literary magazines since the early 2000s, and is a recepient of the Bella István-díj (István Bella Award in Poetry, 2016) and the Móricz Zsigmond-ösztöndíj (Zsigmond Móricz Scholarship, 2013). Szabina Ughy is an editor at Móra Publishers, which specializes in children’s literature.

Peter Sherwood taught at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (now part of University College London) until 2007. From 2008 until his retirement in 2014 he was Distinguished Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He received the Pro Cultura Hungarica prize of the Hungarian Republic in 2001, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2007, the János Lotz Medal of the International Association for Hungarian Studies in 2011, the László Országh Prize of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English in 2016, and the Árpád Tóth Prize for translation in 2020. His translations from Hungarian include Miklós Vámos's The Book of Fathers, Noémi Szécsi's The Finno-Ugrian Vampire, and collections of essays by Antal Szerb and Béla Hamvas. He co-translated Zsuzsa Selyem's It's Raining in Moscow (Contra Mundum Press, 2020).

HLO HU

 

Book Review: The Fictions of Arthur Cravan: Poetry, Boxing and Revolution

1 September 2021

Aaron Eames, Loughborough University 

Dafydd Jones, The Fictions of Arthur Cravan: Poetry, Boxing and Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019)

Arthur Cravan (1887-1918) was a sailor in the Pacific, muleteer, orange-picker in California, snake charmer, hotel thief, logger in the great forests, former French boxing champion, grandson to the Queen’s Chancellor, Berlin automobile chauffeur, gentleman thief, and much else besides – or so he claimed. Provocateur, poet and poser, we know for certain that Cravan mingled with the pre-war Parisian avantgarde, was knocked out in an exhibition match by Jack Johnson, and was the nephew of Oscar Wilde. He is, at first glance, a biographer’s dream but, when one considers all the misinformation, mystique, and mythology surrounding (and generated by) this remarkable man, he quickly becomes an impossible subject. In The Fictions of Arthur Cravan, Dafydd W. Jones manages to get to grips with this simultaneously effusive and elusive figure and place his impressive list of epithets in their proper context. Giving due acknowledgement to Maria Lluïsa Borràs’s Arthur Cravan: une stratégie du scandale (1996), this book provides anglophone audiences with the first comprehensive biographical study of this ‘twentieth century man of mystery’.^[1]

In reality ‘Arthur Cravan’ is a fiction, a pseudonym of Fabian Avénarius Lloyd, but it is the name by which the man is primarily known. Lloyd developed many identities: ‘Bombardier Wells’, ‘Édouard Archinard’, ‘Jean Rubidini’, ‘Numa Persan’, ‘Philippe Or’, ‘Robert Miradique’, but ‘Cravan’ was his central persona. Jones assumes his audience’s familiarity with Cravan, and his legacy as a ‘proto-Dadaist’ and ‘nihilist hero’ (4), from the outset. We read, for instance, about his ‘dreamy orange-picking’ (55) without hearing much else about this languid interlude. This is offset by the book’s chronological structure which follows Cravan’s life from birth in Switzerland in 1887, his eventful sojourns in Germany, France, Spain, the United States and Mexico, up to his enigmatic disappearance in the Pacific in 1918, allowing one to become acquainted with his mythos even as the author simultaneously demystifies it. For instance, Jones corrects the tangled timeline of Cravan’s stay in Berlin, and the posthumous Cravanographies of his wife Mina Loy and the poet Blaise Cendrars are held up to the light alongside documentation such as Cravan’s Paris Address Book and passenger manifests. The title of the book thus gestures towards Jones’s combination of an historical scrutiny of Cravan’s legendised life and a critique of his literary works.

Jones examines the latter in detail. Chapters four and five in particular explore Cravan’s journal Maintenant, whose five issues he compiled almost single-handedly between April 1912 and April 1915. He critiques Cravan’s various journalistic and fictional endeavours, including his notoriously merciless review of the 1914 Salon des Indépendants, the annual exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants founded in Paris in 1884 to promote the work of Impressionists and other artists rejected by the official Salon. In his review Cravan took the chance ‘to pillory, insult and summarily dismiss his close as well as fringe Parisian acquaintances’ (155) including the artists Robert and Sonia Delaunay; ‘his insulting invective’, Jones dryly comments, ‘was nothing if not inclusive’ (156). The author also considers Cravan’s attempts at poetry, identifying his debts to Walt Whitman in, for example, these characteristic lines from ‘Hie!’:

I would like to be in Vienna and Calcutta,

Catch every train and every boat,

Lay every woman and gorge myself on every dish,

Man of fashion, chemist, whore, drunk, musician, labourer, painter, acrobat, actor;

Old man, child, crook, hooligan, angel and rake; millionaire, bourgeois, cactus, giraffe, or crow;

Coward, hero, Negro, monkey, Don Juan, pimp, lord, peasant, hunter, industrialist,

Flora and fauna:

I am all things, all men and all animals! (126-127)

This is little more than Cravan’s ‘legendary roll-call’ (62) or his dream CV writ large.

Friedrich Nietzsche famously claimed to philosophise with a hammer. Jones makes use of the finer instruments in Nietzsche’s arsenal, along with the theoretical toolkit of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to read Cravan’s life. At times this critical apparatus can seem superfluous, as it does in chapter eight where in Jones’s own words the idea of ‘“death” in the infinitive’ acts as an ‘undercurrent’ (259), one that underwhelmingly rejoins the main course. It can also feel incomplete. In order to pin down the mercurial Cravan, Jones proposes a ‘schizo-biography’ that can encompass his myriad identities. Jones fails to define this term satisfactorily, perhaps leaning too heavily on a reference to his earlier monograph Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (2014). At other junctures, however, the theory-driven critique is highly illuminating and well-integrated. Jones’s application of Deleuze’s notion of the subject as ‘assemblage’, for example, generates an intriguing way of thinking about Cravan’s identity: where we might have seen a man in a mask, we are encouraged to perceive him as a mass of multiplicities. Jones argues that Lloyd/Cravan realised this and set about ‘creating, experimenting with and transforming (his) life’ (47) as he wished. His first step, for instance, in becoming a boxer was appearing to be one, just as he wrote that ‘[i]t is essential to be American, or at least to look like you are one, which is exactly the same thing’ (73) – to appear to be something is to become it.

There is plenty here of interdisciplinary interest. As a Wilde scholar, I can speak to the significance of this book in providing a necessary study of Wilde’s extraordinary nephew to complement that of his extraordinary niece Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Wilde.^[2] This is particularly evident where Jones discusses Cravan’s short story ‘Oscar Wilde est vivant!’ (Oscar Wilde is Alive!) in which Cravan pretends that Wilde, who died in Paris on 30 November 1900, casually stops by his home for a chat on the 23 March 1913 (Cravan assumes he has been living in South East Asia). Jones offers an intriguing reading of this tale as ‘a productive continuation of [André] Gide’s “Hommage à Oscar Wilde”’ to which it is ‘strikingly close in imitation’ (149), contending that the work which brought Cravan transatlantic attention was also a parodic response to an earlier Wilde-related memoir.

Jones both builds upon his own previously published research and makes full use of the latest scholarship by Bertrand Lacarelle and Bastiaan van der Velden, as well as the various articles contained in La règle du jeu, 53 (October2013), and Arthur Cravan: maintenant? (2017), a Museu Picasso exhibition catalogue edited by Emmanuel Guigon (with English texts translated by Paul Edson). Jones proves that, even without the mythology, Cravan lived a captivating life; indeed the author has the best of both worlds, being able to rehearse the legend even while dissecting it. However, the insistence on dense philosophical criticism in places renders Jones’s study difficult to penetrate without a complementary understanding of Deleuze, and the prose style of Jones’s preface in particular sets one up to expect (incorrectly, of course) that the rest of the book will be written in a sort of Expressionist stream of consciousness. Nevertheless, The Fictions of Arthur Cravan will serve as an essential basis for future scholarship, having provided us simultaneously with a biography of Fabian Lloyd and a critique of Arthur Cravan’s legend.

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Sources:

[1] As he has been called by Mike Richardson and Rick Geary in their graphic novel Cravan (Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2005).

[2] See Joan Schenkar, Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece (London: Virago Press, 2000).

THE MODERNIST REVIEW