The best poetry books of 2024 so far
December: Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito
Though Fabio Morábito is one of the most celebrated poets in Mexico, Invisible Dog is the first edition of his work translated into English. Born to Italian parents in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1955, he has lived in Mexico City since the age of 15 and writes in Spanish, his second language. The poems in Invisible Dog draw on five decades of work and five poetry collections, collaboratively selected by the poet and his translator, Richard Gwyn. This is a parallel text, and it’s satisfying to see how Gwyn has preserved the shapes and lineation of Morábito’s verse, and what comes across as the tone and philosophy of his vision.
I am far from the best student of Latin American poetry, but even a passing acquaintance with its canon will familiarise you with a lyric tradition that tends to value directness and clarity. It’s often a measured and sonorous free verse, liberated from the anglophone burden of prosody’s stresses and intonations – a mixed blessing – and thus has a very different attitude to line-breaks, with lines often concise and never capitalised. This unadorned quality allows us to focus on the voice of the poet as it advises, suggests, or shares its own confusion:
I always arrive late
at funerals,
when the eyes
of those attending
have dried
and some have already forgotten
the face of the deceased,
how old he was,
the cause of his death.
Then I arrive
with my anachronistic weeping…(from “Sobbing”)
You can even see this tradition’s impact on Anglophone Instagram poetry – only this trend never uses the form to say anything especially interesting. In Morábito’s work, the poem’s surface is both clear and immediately understandable, but there’s depth behind it – observations and details that in turn disturb the waters of our own memories. As he explains in ‘As Before a Meadow’: “This is why I write: to recover / from the depths all that adheres there, / because it is the only detour in which I believe, / because to write opens a second stomach / in the species.”
By moving house often, Morábito has come to master the art of living transiently: “I have learned not to glue / furniture to the walls, / not to hammer nails too deep, / only to turn the screw so far.” He knows the unsettled feeling will pass: “I let the move dissolve like a fever, like a scab that falls off…” It has become something of a cliché to praise a poet for recognising the wonder in the everyday, but when done this well, it’s hard not to. One such home is the flat Morábito lived in aged 16, having recently arrived in Mexico City. Here he finds himself speculating on the course his life might have taken, had he not been offered the apartment:
Maybe now I would be someone else,
Everything would be different,
I wouldn’t write what I write.
Who would offer me
such a room again, overlooking a statue
in the silence of a square?(from “Journey to Pátzcuaro”)
Coming to terms with a new place resonates throughout the collection: as Gwyn puts it in his illuminating afterword, the reader of a new poet is also “setting out in a strange land, confronted by an array of decisions to be made, any one of which might mark us for eternity”.
I enjoyed Invisible Dog not least for the expedient introduction it provides to a new reader of Morábito’s work, but also for the pleasure of seeing a style evolve and modulate over decades. His poems from the early 2000s become, if anything, tighter in focus, hymns to attention inspired by smaller details: letting a fly out of the window and the way its noise interferes with the cadence of the poem; the way a door opens and shuts in a draft.
Spend enough time with poets and you notice a preoccupation with status which can assail even the most wary and exceptional talent. But what makes Morábito great is his resistance to greatness: throughout the collection, his sense of irony and humour deepens, particularly in his 21st century poems. “Three Ants”, one of my favourites, presents the poet sitting on the toilet, observing the creatures of the title: “just like every morning. / Are they the same or do they take turns?”. He allows them to live, concluding: “Someone is watching me, for sure… and has decided not to step on me.”
This is an essential collection for anyone who cares about contemporary poetry. Gentle but caustically funny, humane but clear-sighted, it’s a wonder that his work isn’t better known in the UK. Invisible Dog should correct this omission and bring many more readers and writers into Morábito’s bright and gently compelling orbit. LK
Luke Kennard’s poetry collections include Cain and Notes on the Sonnets. Invisible Dog is published by Carcanet at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
November: An Arbitrary Lightbulb by Ian Duhig
Midway through An Arbitrary Light Bulb, Ian Duhig’s ninth volume of poetry, he gets to “The Point”. It’s not the destination the reader might have expected. After poems that zippily refract the voices of other artists, from Wilfred Owen to Jorge Luis Borges to John Ashbery, Duhig defines not only the function of poetry, but also of buses:
The point of a bus is windows, for Laird:
a top front-seat view an image for poetry.
What you see from up here, cars cannot:
Over hedges or Enclosure dry stone walls…
Here, Duhig refers to the poet Nick Laird’s comparison of writing poems to sitting on the top deck of a bus, “watching [...] through my own reflection”; the poem’s epigraph, from Mona Arshi, also proposes that, “Poems, if they were buses, should have ‘unknown destination’ on the front.” In this collection, Duhig’s poems are, among other things, wonderful tour buses: they speed down lanes of recollection, scooting along infinite library shelves and hopping from stop to stop with happy disregard for such minor inconveniences as the Highway Code, geography, or linear time.
Duhig, who has won the National Poetry Competition twice, and been shortlisted four times for the T S Eliot Prize, has an approach formed by collaboration. He spent 15 years working with homeless people in Leeds, before becoming a full-time writer in 1994, where he has continued working on projects with musicians, filmmakers and other artists from marginalised groups. His poems in An Arbitrary Light Bulb, which cover everything from Valkyries to young offenders, extend this spirit of collaboration: as well as Ashbery and Owen, there’s also Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens.
His title poem traces a similarly associative thread. Duhig finds “a pebble the exact shape of a light bulb”, which suddenly lights up another, “above my head” in trails of light-bulb thoughts “like Little Plum’s / smoke-signals”, and finally ends with the “reminder” that “such a bulb is called an ‘arbitrary’.” This is the light bulb that jumps up above the poet’s head as he thinks: he’s looking to leave space between his thoughts – between the ordering of his verse – for what’s arbitrary or contingent. These are destinations unknown but never unwelcome.
And Duhig’s verse is immaculately ordered. There are a few playful exceptions, including an undulating series of stanzas from the perspective of a worm, and a Hopkins-inflected ode to a kingfisher, that “furnace-chested zip of lapis lazuli”, but otherwise An Arbitrary Light Bulb stages its poems in neat quatrains, rhyme never wholly absent, metre’s semi-regular tick never quite out of the range of human hearing.
That form has ramifications not merely for the collection’s sound or cadence, but for the shape it regularly makes on the page. Nowhere is this more apparent than in “Poem Beginning with a Line from Ashbery”, which borrows John Ashbery’s line, “The room I entered was a dream of this room”, and spins it into a series of variations: “The theme of this room is stanza’s meaning [...] The theme of this room is stanzas dreaming.” On the page, the poem’s stanzas – or rooms, per their Italian origin – are “cages”, even “tombs”; a final cube of poem at the collection’s end refers to that “final box, / that verse with breath of faux oak / where all shades of meaning wait”. But they’re also a series of containers for thought, letting the shape of reflection settle in a square form.
“[B]y an accident of typography,” the poet Michael Donaghy once noted, “the printed poem is traditionally laid out as a block of text in the centre of the page,” so “reinforc[ing] the impression that every poem aspires to a rectilinear condition, the shape of a mirror or a window”. Like Laird watching his own reflection, Donaghy’s metaphor encapsulates the use of the poem as a frame, one in which the poet may unexpectedly catch sight of some past, future or present self, arbitrarily reflected under an unexpected light bulb. That’s the ending of “The Point”: “My ghost in this machine / is smiling at you from the top deck window.” IC
Imogen Cassels’s most recent poetry pamphlet is Chesapeake. An Arbitrary Lightbulb is published by Picador at £12.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
The Telegraph’s Poem of the Week column appears every Thursday in our Culture Newsletter. Recent weeks have featured new poems by Sasha Dugdale, Ian McMillan and Caroline Bird. Sign up for free at telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter
October: Monster by Dzifa Benson
“One language is never enough”, Dzifa Benson writes in the first section of Monster, her capacious debut collection. That opening sequence orbits around Sarah Baartman, a Khoekhoe South African woman who was toured around Europe in the 19th century as an object of curiosity, known as the “Hottentot Venus”. In Monster, Benson looks to bring both Baartman and her milieu to life, evoking a chorus of voices to demonstrate the bodily horror, racism and misogyny which surrounded her treatment and celebrity.
Benson is sharp on what it means to have a body. She shows bodily animalness, its flesh, as well as the weight – literal and figurative – of gaining notoriety for having one: “I remember that all animals were once men and/women in the time of the First People”; “I wish to take off this/Hottentot Venus skin. It is heavy.” She takes a maximalist approach: her variety of formal approaches culminating in something of a hall-of-mirrors effect, with language extracted from contemporary newspapers, the sounds of publicists, defenders and exploiters of Baartman. Then there are poems written in the voice of Baartman herself: a mix of Khoekhoe dialect words and euphonic, often musical, phrasing.
Jump to section
This wide-ranging method has, almost necessarily, mixed results. Where a poem such as “From the Morning Chronicle” plays very well with register, others fall flatter. Two “remixes” of found texts, which make new work using only words from the original source, and an erasure poem, in which words from an Attorney General are redacted to create a new poem “hidden” within, feel less essential to the multi-faceted portrait Benson is building. The playful, slangy “Bottom Power” with its pop-cultural touchstones feels too jovial without their context: “Then again/I see you baby//Shaking that ass”; “Pulsating, switching, locking/Down the rhythm of Sir Mixalot’s fancy.”
At their best, these poems have an urgency to their tone, and a movement, speaking a “language of carbon, sap and distress signals”. The second section continues with the collection’s ongoing concerns about the body and the self, moving to how discussions and dissections of Baartman’s identity can implicate its author. Again, there are distinct high points, particularly in moments that make explicit the primacy of lived experience, moments willing to look the reader in the eye: “Dzifa’s body only believes what it can truly feel.”
The risk of parts such as these, or others where a visual poem is “layered onto a fragment of my genome”, is that they might seem like a slide towards solipsism, especially after the generous third-person of the book’s opening. But countermanding that charge, one senses a political point being made about visibility, ownership and memorialising. Retellings of myths and origin stories help to curate what might, otherwise, have been lost to history, as with the re-rendering of Baartman’s silenced voice: “When he died, she/would quickly forget what his voice sounded like as if memory is/vegetable and can just rot.” The poems of a direct, and strikingly personal, nature are balanced by those in other voices; several of the strongest poems here are dramatic monologues of a kind, Benson proving an able, empathetic ventriloquist.
Other highpoints include a meditative ekphrastic poem “Three Colours Black”, after a painting by Glyn Philpot (reproduced here in full); Benson compares, with sensitivity, the monochrome to be “like a sacred song the pigment of piano keys”. At the other end of her sonic palette, there’s a response to a Blues song by Robert Johnson, “Black Dog Bone Blues”, which comes with a refrain that lifts Benson’s already syncopated diction to something more propulsive: “You got my mojo working now, be sure to use it well.”
It’s a long miscellany of a collection, and at times Monster feels more like a Selected Poems than a single volume. But while some of the poems feel like the result of standalone commissions inspired by films, or exhibitions, and so struggle to rise beyond their sites of origin, the range and scale of Benson’s interests can also throw up the odd, delighting outlier. One of the best of this kind is “Here, This Bird” which may not “fit”, as such, within the book’s architecture, but which acts as a well-wrought event in language nonetheless. DR
Declan Ryan is the author of the poetry collection Crisis Actor. Monster is published by Bloodaxe at £12.99. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
September: Citizen Poet by Eavan Boland
The Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died in 2020, was the epitome of a figure she described as an “exile in search of a self”. Born in Dublin in 1944, she had a splintered childhood: she moved to Britain aged six, where her father was posted as the Irish ambassador, then returned to Ireland in her teens. Later, she travelled to America, and became professor of English at Stanford University. Her early writing life was spent trying to fight for her place within the male-dominated landscape of Irish poetry, reshaping its canon so that she, and other women, might see themselves and their lives reflected in it.
Citizen Poet, a collection of Boland’s essays on nationhood, history and language, isn’t the whole lot: as the editor Jody Allen Randolph notes in the foreword, a separate collection of Boland’s writing on female poets will follow. But it’s wide-ranging, thrillingly combative, and evidence of an ambitious commitment to broadening poetry’s scope of possibility – and, in doing so, remaking its past.
In her autobiographical prose work Object Lessons (1995), Boland noted that she’d put that book together “not as a prose narrative is usually constructed but as a poem might be”; that’s true for much of the writing here, too. She uses visual imagery, repetition and a certain circling of thought: themes are revisited, developed and subtly tweaked for emphasis. Not all this repetition is fresh, but her contentions are remarkably consistent. Boland writes that poetry, as she first began to write and encounter it, had “no name for my life”, or the lives of the many Irish women who lived in suburbs, raised children and went to their desk to write in the evenings. The temptation, as she puts it, was to accept one’s lot, to “honour the power of poetry and forget that hinterland where you lived for so long”.
Instead, Boland wanted to create poems in which her everyday experience could be recognised as artistic material. A world of interiors, childcare and the eroticised existence of Irish women, present and past, became her subject. Ultimately, her goal was to make the generations following her less lonely. As Heather Clark puts it, quoting a Boland poem as she introduces this collection: “‘The young woman who climbs the stairs’ to write alone in her flat will now inhabit a ‘different’ tradition: ‘This time, when she looks up, I will be there.’”
Citizen Poet is part Bildungsroman, part manifesto. The female figure had been a symbolic – and often nationalistic – trope in Irish poetry; but Boland here has something of a canon-building instinct, conscripting the likes of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Bishop as part of her attempt to construct a female aesthetic. This urge towards claiming language for female experience is joined with her idea of being guided by “two maps” – one looking to poetry’s past, and one to its future. She talks of a desire to recover the silent, buried Irish female histories, erased by having been for so long only the subject, not the driver, of its literature.
Boland is especially astute on the idea of authority, earned and unearned. She rails against a lazy bardic certainty, the likes of which she finds in nationalist ballads or other agenda-led writing, and instead says that “authority grows the more the speaker is weakened and made vulnerable by the tensions he or she creates”. She perceptively notes in a late piece on diversity in poetry that “the margin re-defines the centre, and not the other way around”.
Most impressively, Boland is always careful to layer her arguments to avoid presenting simple polemic, or truism. She’s wary of exceptionalism or separatism, or of allowing writers to “demand a bad poem be reconsidered as a good ethic”. And while her concluding thoughts, taken from her editorials when overseeing Poetry Ireland Review, read as tributes to the value of community and collaboration, she also always makes room for the private poet, the un-useful non-joiner. Fittingly, Citizen Poet comes to a vision of what poetry might look like by broadening its definitions of what a poet looks like too: those previously on the edges come to claim their place in reshaping the art-form. If poetry, especially Irish poetry, has become less lonely than it was when Boland first encountered it, that’s thanks in no small part to her lifelong work. DR
Citizen Poet is published by Carcanet at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
July: Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo
Adam is Gboyega Odubanjo’s first full-length book of poetry. As far as I know, unless there is another completed manuscript waiting to be published, it will be his last until a collected poems is put together, which ought to happen sooner rather than later. Born in east London in 1996, Odubanjo died last August aged 27, in the midst of revising Adam for publication. In it, he tells both the few known actual facts and the imagined facts of the story of “Adam”, birth name unknown, a boy between four and eight years old, whose dismembered body was found in the Thames on September 21, 2001.
A prefatory poem, “The Garden”, serves as both a stage-setting and a reckoning – “your uncle’s adam. your mother – adam floating. your cousin – adam bleeding in the masquerade”, Odubanjo writes. A few pages later, the title poem “Adam” begins “first and foremost thank you to the coast”, going on to thank “ceremony”, “tradition” and the Thames, addressing each directly, as if these things were the poem’s audience.
In this way, it positions the reader as a spectator to a performance – an observer of the “masquerade”. And the varied poems that follow act as a kind of masquerade; rather than a single continuous narrative, or a straightforward character study, they give us a series of glimpses – “The Many Adams of Adam” (as one poem’s title puts it).
Because we know almost nothing about Adam, if he is to be remembered, he must first be imagined. Adam the book is a performance of Adam the child, a writing of that child into posthumous being. And if Adam must be performed, something like a history of immigration to the UK must be performed as well, since Adam – who is believed to have come from Benin City, Nigeria – here becomes a symbolic figure, one connected to every arrival. In “The Garden”, “arrivals… [are] greeted with cups of river / and given a week to change their names to adam”.
To that end, a few pages after “Adam” the poem, one encounters what seems to me the strongest poem in a book full of strong poems, “A Potted History of East”, a dramatic monologue which seems to encapsulate the East End’s long history of immigration (“in the beginning. / it was a gush of us and we came from all over”). It concludes:
is this where eden is. where the sun rises.
developers calling it barcelona on thames now. council say
dagenham leo is alive and well. it’s cold as chips
but the ice cream van is still going off and we’re laughing.we never unpacked.
so far east it’s west to another man. no bells here.
still we move. almost back where we left now.
Even though he was just getting started, Odubanjo was already a master of making poetry out of speech. One hears a living voice in these lines – one overhears the speaker on the next bench, say, as one checks one’s phone – but it is never a voice that sounds as if it were trying to say a poem. Add or remove a word, and the lines would lose their colloquial flow, and the whole would be weakened.
That’s how you know the lines are poetry, though they don’t call attention to themselves as such. Though they’re aching and joyful and beautiful and final all at once, they’re still grounded in everyday life. The lyrical question “is this where eden is” comes immediately after a deadpan observation – “someone’s left their lamb leg in the pub again”.
Odubanjo’s art was – and is, in the never-ending presentness of his book – an art of the impossibly perfected everyday. He makes a person who speaks poetry a real person, a person with whom the reader yearns. But Adam grants its readers extraordinary perceptions throughout – it’s a light, keeping visible a story too likely to fade from view, and making more visible a poet who must be read. SMC
Shane McCrae’s latest poetry collection is The Many Hundreds of the Scent. Adam is published by Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
June: Poems 2016-2024 by JH Prynne
There’s a squib by James Fenton that runs “Jeremy Prynne, Jeremy Prynne, isn’t your oeuvre rather thynne?” It was already a hostage to fortune in 2001, when Fenton composed it – Prynne’s oeuvre was expanding slowly but steadily, a short text every other year or so. The collected Poems of 2015 ran to a hefty 688 pages, the work of 30 years. Now, in a massive new volume collecting some 36 recent pamphlets, this has been more than doubled.
J H Prynne’s work is difficult, but (unlike the work of many other difficult poets) it is not at all cryptic. There’s no sense of meaning being withheld or obscured; nothing cries out for elucidation. It doesn’t mean, in that sense, at all, and if instead of getting annoyed by it you allow yourself to be swept away, it is buffeting and exhilarating, not at all like any other poetry in the world. Instead of being cryptic it’s resistant, undercutting sentence by sentence or word by word anything you could find to say about it.
Prynne taught at Cambridge for many years, and part of his work’s strangeness might be traced back to the Practical Criticism element of the English syllabus there, brought in by I A Richards, which involves analysing anonymised poems from any genre or era. “Stock responses”, critical clichés or ready-made opinions were Richards’s particular bugbear, and Prynne’s poetry is Teflon to them; more than any other poetry I know, when you read Prynne you are on your own.
At its best it is like being given a back-door key into the language. Here’s the opening to “Inshore Horizon”:
On line beside the sea quietly, once is enough
to match up to relish famous skies, the harbour
clear and evenly displayed. Flowers of sulphur,
salt caught in sunlight shone across dark lift
canopies, distant voices indistinct…
The gorgeous lyric voice combines with shimmery grammatical uneasiness – there are several possible resolutions of the grammar, depending on whether “canopies” is noun or verb. More often, syntax is no guide at all, and the lines jump spark-like from word to word: “Bit brittle bract ruffle backup, chieftain tic / fat chance advance blind guess invested” is a typical beginning. The connections are sonic rather than syntactic – at his most obscure Prynne still moves at a tearing pace, there is no sense of wallowing.
Like the work of other modernist poets, all Prynne’s work has involved collage in one form or another, often of elements too small to be detected. (Bloodaxe’s recent edition of Prynne’s long 1983 poem The Oval Window carefully elucidates all its sources: they include Times editorials, programming manuals, textbooks on optics and articles from the Cambridge Evening News.)
This practice is continued throughout the more recent work, but there are also many echoes and borrowings that the lay reader will find more familiar. Nursery rhymes, especially, have become central; in the 2020 collection Orchard, featuring 25 poems each named after a different fruit, “Here we go round the mulberry bush” gets quarried and transformed:
ripe to shake to fallen spread here go round
bush like tree way, foolhardy off
piste silken sleeve woven mull sheen
motile mulatto mercy be eristic fit
cold and frosty, trusty merry ultimate
branch age seize rich colourant fool
Other poems Prynne-ify “The Owl and the Pussycat”, the ballad of “Molly Malone”, and (memorably and unexpectedly) “Just One Cornetto”. A whole book, 2021’s Snooty Tipoffs, is made up of improvised rhymes, lullabies and children’s songs – all of which are both recognisably Prynne’s work and could be enjoyed by very young readers. I’ve tested some of the lullabies on my own daughter with great success.
As with the earlier Poems, this is a book that rewards many different directions of approach. “The way, forward step-fast, / hand by clue in hand”, he writes; “step-fast”, I think Prynne’s own coinage, conjoins “quick-step” and “steadfast” (pivoting on the English contranym “fast”, meaning both rapid and fixed): we are moving forward quickly, but with our hearts in it. And “...hand by clue in hand” is likewise two phrases grafted together, “hand in hand” and “by clue”, “clue” with its original meaning of “ball of thread”, the thread that led Theseus out of the labyrinth.
The whole sentence, the final sentence of the final poem of the 2018 collection Or Scissel, gives an account of how to read what’s come before: to move forward through it wholeheartedly and rapidly, without getting bogged down, in communion with the author while at the same time working our way out of something; the same author who built the labyrinth has at least given us the thread. JC
John Clegg’s latest poetry collection is Aliquot. Poems 2016-2024 is published by Bloodaxe at £35 in hardback, and £30 in paperback. To order your copy call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
May: The Strongbox by Sasha Dugdale
There has been so much recent poetry inspired by ancient Greece that I’ve wondered whether there’s anything left to say about the myths at all. Alice Oswald’s Nobody (2019) drew on her beloved Homer; Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook (2021) was a wildly inventive translation of Euripides’s Herakles; Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron (2022) deftly retold the Minotaur myth.
I always approach these collections with some trepidation. I’m not so clued up on the myths, and fit into a trend Andrew Motion has said he’s noticed in his students: that as the years go by, he increasingly has to explain what a poem’s classical references meant.
It’s a relief, then, that Sasha Dugdale doesn’t expect readers to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Homer. Like her last collection, 2020’s Deformations, her sixth volume The Strongbox is heavily inspired by Greek mythology, but draws on easily recognisable figures (Helen, Paris, Cassandra), and with playfulness, not impenetrability. It’s an ambitious work, with 14 sections ranging from reimaginings of Helen of Troy to the rape of Europa by Zeus.
That 14-part structure isn’t as much of a “strongbox” as it looks on the contents page: the narrative thread keeps threatening to escape. “Narrative appals me,” Dugdale writes, “To lay such details out in print / I want to let it wander off the page / But it can only be as it is.”
She has fun with transposing mythological characters to our modern world; the Fates become “three old women” weaving by the “shapeshifting beam of the telly”, while a retelling of the myth of Persephone slips from beautiful lyricism – “Let me exist underground with the iris / slowly opening my pale hands” – to tabloid-esque headlines: “THE DOWNFALL OF A DIVA … DARK TRUTH A MOTHER HID FROM THE WORLD.”
The first section, “Anatomy of an Abduction”, however, feels directly drawn from our world. “With the sun / appearing over the plane wing”, an abducted girl bears strong resemblance to the Isis bride Shamima Begum, “sitting bolt upright / phrasebook on her lap”. As she tries to get inside the girl’s head, Dugdale’s off-rhymes (thanks/phalanx, marriage/hostage) have an appropriately violent feel in the mouth:
did she offer prayers of thanks
did she pass between childhood
and marriage
like a hostage
thrown from one phalanx
onto the sand.
In her academic life, Dugdale is a translator of Russian and Ukrainian literature, and the “troops” and “drones” that follow feel particularly close to our current moment.
Other sections are more absurd, often told in the form of playscripts: Helen recounts to Paris her dreams; Hermes washes up in our world and is spoken to by a trippy, Keatsian “pair of livid lips”; Menelaus and his wife Helen have an odd arithmetic class. It’s all part of Dugdale’s rejection of narrative as the only means to tell a story, but this experiment might occasionally lose some readers. She pulls off the point better when she directly addresses it, as when an am-dram group gathers in the second section, this “early stage in the rehearsal process”, to decode the first.
Dugdale is at her best when she writes about memory and déjà vu, “the aching sense … Like water / she has been here before”. What if, The Strongbox asks, all our mistakes are just iterations of previous stories, and women like Begum are in some sense successors of Helen? Consider this one beautiful stanza:
And is remembering merely the sudden exposure
of a dream? As when the border guard drags film
from the camera’s body—is recall
the fatal undoing of the sealed?
Such philosophical questions can only be asked sparingly. Another poet might have tried to unify the disparate parts of this collection by deploying more of them, but it’s good that Dugdale didn’t. There can only be a few echoes before a poem becomes lost in its own reverberating cave. It’s this restraint and carefulness that makes Dugdale’s work as strong as its title. LT
April: The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian
Isfahan – currently in the news as the target of Israeli missile strikes – is home to some of Iran’s greatest architectural jewels, among them the misleadingly named “Palace of 40 Pillars”. It has only half that many. The other 20 are an optical illusion, reflections floating in the lake it faces.
There’s a similar architectural sleight-of-hand to Armen Davoudian’s first book. The contents page lists 20 poems, but the title-poem turns out to contain 20 sonnets all on its own – and some of the best I’ve read in quite some time. The book is filled with mirrors and doubles, recurring images (swans abound), divided halves and unusual perspectives.
It’s a reflective collection in every sense; Davoudian looks back on his childhood in Iran, his Armenian family’s history, and a sexual awakening, from the distance of his new life in America. One sonnet begins by describing his grandfather in Iran, before a poignant shift in perspective reveals that he’s only looking at a framed photo: “I mist the glass and clean / away last summer’s promise to return / the coming summer. I’m always going back / on going back.”
Yes, a bunch of who-I-am-and-where-I-come-from poems: so far, so typical for a debut. But as with all good poetry, what matters isn’t so much what is said as how it’s said. And here the how perfectly matches the what, through the formal devices Davoudian deploys, both in his stanzaic forms – the rubaiyat, the ghazal – and line-by-line, where half-rhymes and subtle metrical effects show a good ear that’s only matched by his good nose. (“Saffron Rice” wryly contrasts the “rosewater” worn by a group of “eligible girls” with “the mulish reek / of stiff-necked single young men gangling // over the tittering crowd for O a glimpse / of that one’s ankle”).
The first sonnet from the “Forty Pillars” sequence begins:
Twenty pillars drip into the pool
their likenesses, where the likeness of a boy
wavers among the clouds, eyeing the boy
who’s waiting for another. All is dual:
two rows of roses frame the pool, in twos
the swans glide, each on another’s breast, then fuse
in a headless embrace.
Isn’t there something wickedly audacious about rhyming “boy” with “boy”? The reflection in the water becomes an exact repetition, while the image of one boy looking at another echoes his poems elsewhere about same-sex desire. Throughout, there’s a sense of wanton pleasure in language. Just listen to the line he summons up to describe walking on a Persian rug: “Redundant roses kiss our sockless feet.”
In one sonnet, his car-mechanic father “bends under the open hood, comes up // twenty years younger in another shop.” Davoudian’s not above nicking a good move, in this case from Seamus Heaney. It’s a nod to “Digging”, and Heaney’s father, whose “straining rump among the flowerbeds / Bends low, comes up twenty years away”.
Davoudian wears his literary loves on his sleeve. Heaney is joined in his personal pantheon by the sometimes dandyish, sometimes devastating formalism of James Merrill (he replicates the intricate stanza-form of Merrill’s “The Black Swan”); the 20th-century ghazals of Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi (he translates one); and late Auden, who here shares a page, perhaps for the first time, with Osama bin Laden (Davoudian mentions both in a sonnet about “my ill-matched countries”).
One breathless cover-blurb calls this book “formally radical”, which is ridiculous. Aside from the odd gimmick (such as a lipogram written using only the letters of the word “pomegranate”), what’s striking is how un-radical it is. Davoudian writes almost exclusively in traditional metres. The opening poem adopts a form you’d have been more likely to find poets using in Donne’s day: quatrains of rhyming couplets, alternating between three-, four- and five-beat iambic lines in a fixed pattern. Out of the 30 or so poetry collections published this April which I’ve leafed through so far, Davoudian’s is the only one making hay with metrical patterns in this way.
Why is this so rare? Perhaps there’s some kind of stigma attached to it. “Form has become such a bête noire that I don’t even like calling it that,” Davoudian has said. He prefers the term “music”. A generation ago, it was a cliché that America – Land of the Free – was by necessity Land of the Free Verse, too. But that’s changing: you couldn’t make a list of great poets living in the US today that omitted the form-fixated Shane McCrae and Terrance Hayes.
Here on the Telegraph Poetry Desk – turn left at the washrooms, ignore the mice – we often receive letters asking why, or sometimes “why oh why”, poetry “doesn’t rhyme and keep a beat any more”. Those correspondents might be pleased to learn that much of the best recent poetry does. Rhyme, complex fixed forms such as the sonnet corona, and the unkillable iambic pentameter are making a minor comeback – and, intriguingly, particularly in the work of poets with one foot in another land or language.
You can add Davoudian’s name to a list that includes AE Stallings (American, writing in Greece) and Kayo Chingonyi (born in Zambia, writing in England). In his gentler, Heaneyish moments, Davoudian’s style has much in common with Zaffar Kunial, whose work nods to his parents’ regional dialects (English Midlands and Pahari-Potwari).
Davoudian previously wrote in Farsi, and has published a book of translations from Persian. In one sonnet, he recalls his younger self finding a sensual, even sexual enjoyment in a bilingual facing text (another kind of mirror-image): “When I close the book, two tongues touch.” Poets can sometimes be insular creatures, so it’s always refreshing to find one reading and writing across cultures, open to other perspectives. In a 2022 interview, Davoudian said:
Every poetic tradition is bound to tie itself up in ridiculous parochial debates that just pass you by, decade by decade. You know, ‘Is it morally alright to write in other people’s voices, or use similes, or write in metre?’ And then you read in another tradition, and it often turns out these are not questions essential to the art. They seem that way from the inside, but they’re not. TFS
Tristram Fane Saunders’s debut poetry collection is Before We Go Any Further. The Palace of Forty Pillars is published by Corsair at £10.99. To order your copy call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
March: After You Were, I Am by Camille Ralphs
If there’s one art form which ought to be proudly out of step with the zeitgeist it is poetry. I might go further and call this a duty: stripped of commercial concerns, poetry is at its best when it pursues the artist’s vision as idiosyncratically as possible. Still, in debates about the state of poetry, we often hear from a loud faction of authoritarian formalists who are only happy when attacking contemporary verse for its lack of discipline or metric principle, even while their own work tends towards moralistic doggerel. It’s refreshing, then, to encounter in Camille Ralphs a boldly formalist technician whose poetry is innovative, whose phrasing sings. Ralphs is exceptionally skilled in prosody, but it’s worn lightly, or outweighed by an urgent artistry.
It’s a rare debut collection today that dares to be difficult, to be theologically complex, to be theological at all. Yet After You Were, I Am showcases an ambition, seriousness and wit that make it strangely timeless – one feels it could have been published in any era and be worthy of a readership.
Its first section, “Book of Common Prayers”, rewrites canonical devotions from sources as diverse as Job, St Augustine and Rumi, and does so with a rare panache and integrity. A poem titled “after Mechthild of Magdeburg” takes off from the 13th-century German mystic’s rhapsodic ode to the Almighty, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more seamless and beautiful combination of neologism and anachronism:
O arch as high as Maslow’s hierarchy, O I-wide-eye, surround-soundness of
oh what’s happened this time, yet O timeless bigtime, day that lasts forever and a day,
O, you, beforehand of all forehands
I’m in awe of the effect, not so much a collage as an entirely new creation in reaction to the old.
What sets this work apart is that Ralphs manages to be irreverent and reverent at the same time; alive to the fact that we can’t really have one without the other. If the wordplay is something of a motif it never becomes tired – and wordplay was, after all, good enough for the Metaphysicals. For Ralphs, a pattern of speech is a pattern of thought is a pattern of being. Her poems crack words open, spoonerising and subverting our proverbs and buzz-phrases to ask: what are we really saying? A careful and stricken theology emerges, perhaps best summed up in “after St Francis of Assisi”: “cursed are we who know it’s hard to save the world from everyone who wants to save the world.”
The middle section, “Malkin”, dramatises the 1612 Pendle witch trials in a series of lyrical monologues. The narrative of condemnation and murder by the state comes through in terrifying fragments of speeches under duress, with period-appropriate inconsistencies of spelling and syntax, a wild language yet to crystallise:
I felt the valleys shrunc to gutters cloggd
wth sky I saw a hare uneating embers
in th tumbledown of darck and the rains spalling
the Heavens as I stolle a littl lamb
It’s impeccably researched, and avoids familiar territory or historical cosplay in favour of a layered, linguistic intensity. “Malkin” is about rumour, calumny, the exploitation of the weak to curry favour with the whims of those in power. Ralphs doesn’t point out crass parallels in our own time, and doesn’t need to: the voices of the dead (all of our voices, in time) persist in our supposedly rational age. We cannot deny our place in historical atrocities because they’re part of why we’re here; they’re in our dictionaries, our language, our thought. “Oh what’s happened this time”, indeed.
The collection concludes with “My Word”, a jaw-dropping evocation of Dr John Dee, chief astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, drawing on his own “spiritual diary” of his somewhat quixotic mission to discover the true Word. Again, this is challenging stuff (I expect the most erudite reader will still be thankful for the notes), but intellectually generous enough to show us a good time in recreating an era of gravely serious magic, when metaphysical ambition had a place in the civil service: “he who knew annihilation’s knothing, in a daisy is the daye’s eye, / flattened”. It’s impossible to do it justice in less than a dissertation, but – as with this whole collection – I expect to be re-reading it for years to come. LK
Luke Kennard’s poetry collections include Cain and Notes on the Sonnets. After You Were, I Am is published by Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
February: Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
The literary world – well, the bit of it on X/Twitter – had a small conniption recently. One American poet claimed that another’s unrhymed, unmetered sonnets were “not poetry”, merely “prose”. According to the site, their spat drew the attention of a quarter of a million people, far more than will ever buy either writer’s books.
Why does the “Is this a poem?” debate still get people so worked up? Everyone agrees Anne Carson is a poet – to some, the greatest living poet – and her poetry is often in prose. In 40 years of publications, she has consistently answered “yes, both” to either/or questions: fiction or nonfiction, prose or verse, translation or original writing. Her books include verse novels, a poem-essay on Proust, a comic-book version of a Greek tragedy, and a bundle of pamphlets designed to fall out of their box onto the floor in a random order.
Now comes Wrong Norma: reassuringly book-shaped on the outside, 200 pages of uncategorisable “pieces” on the inside, united only by the fact they’re all somehow uncompromisingly intelligent while being effortlessly readable, and – a word critics don’t often use about Carson – fun.
“The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them wrong,” Carson is quoted as saying on Wrong Norma’s back cover. (Weird, an author who blurbs herself.) “Not linked” is either a fib or a failing. Ideas and characters recur in a way that’s intriguing if by design – it must be – but would be unthinkably sloppy if by mistake. “Eddy”, in an early short story of that name, feeds his pet crow toast, and analyses bloodstains professionally. So, too, does the unnamed narrator seeking revenge on gangsters in “Thret” – a blackly comic study in unease. (Martin McDonagh should film it.) Surely he’s Eddy. Then again, the chap in “Thret” is paranoid, and it’s a story filled with doubles, so who knows?
“An Evening with Joseph Conrad” begins with the poet seeing a man in an elevator who looks a bit like Conrad. Its four pages name-drop (among others) Hardy, Euripides, “the Gorkys”, Eugene Lyons, Goethe, Freud, the poet HD, Achilles and Lacan, who’s quoted in French. This should be insufferable, but miraculously isn’t. What sticks with you aren’t the allusions, but the warm, thoughtful voice, and the witty phrasemaking – Conrad’s “virtuosic goatee”, congregants in church “sat packed like teeth”, piles of sliced bread “as white as its own piety”.
There’s some sombre work here, including a powerful piece about Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni engineer whose law-abiding relatives were killed in 2012 by US drone strikes. (Carson keeps returning to his case; she published a poem about him in The Telegraph last year.) But there’s also a silly streak. “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” is narrated by the sky, who picks up the phone to Beckett’s Godot (“Rusty” to friends, and those friends include Yoko Ono). The silliness doesn’t always gel: in “Getaway”, a woman’s “weekend getaway” takes place inside a honeycomb, a surreal conceit that feels patched-on, rather than fully integrated into the piece.
But Carson’s jokes aren’t just jokes. There’s a lightly worn authority behind them, an honesty: you can be funny and serious. “I have a sense most grief is also deeply and horribly humorous but we’re not supposed to say so.” Grief and wordplay work together in “Snow”, one of the most poignant pieces. It’s a quintessentially Carson-ish balance of thought and feeling. In it, she recalls struggling to write a lecture about “the idea of the university” in the week of her mother’s death. Memories of the latter blur with lecture notes, thoughts on the Bible, storytelling, etymology: “Forbidden by her doctor from her nightly glass of Armagnac she’d taken to dabbing it behind her ears. The word ‘idea’ comes from ancient Greek, ‘to see’.” Few writers are better at capturing how the mind can flit between four things at once.
“Down the road from the summer cottage of my friend Stanley Lombardo is a farm where emus and llamas graze,” Carson writes. “Llamas are stately, with an air of deep comedy, and larger than they seem.” Are these poems, stories, essays, philosophy? No – Anne Carson is a writer of llamas. TFS
Wrong Norma is published by Jonathan Cape at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
January: Top Doll by Karen McCarthy Woolf
On her death in 2011, at the age of 104, the reclusive heiress Huguette Clark left behind an estate worth more than $300 million – and a vast collection of dolls, one of which ended up in the hands of the poet Karen McCarthy Woolf. The latter gives it, and dozens of its big-eyed companions, a fictionalised voice in her third book, a verse novel as eccentric as Clark herself.
If you want a straight account of Clark’s life, there are biographies; Atonement’s Joe Wright is adapting one for TV. In Top Doll, Clark is only glimpsed, a silent, pitiful enigma shuffling from room to room, her elderly face disfigured by “carcinoma-nasty” (as the dolls call it). Her toys, by contrast, won’t shut up, nattering in a cacophonous mix of dialects and verse styles as they prepare for Clark’s departure for “the hospital”.
Miss Ting speaks in Jamaican patois; Lady Mamiko glides between prose and haiku; the Barbies all boast in abecedarians, a silly, irritating poetic form exactly suited to them. They’re all stock types, apart from the anxious, bossy, distractible Top Doll, simply known as “Dolly”, who pipes up in sonnets with runs of skewed half-rhyme (“chandelier” and “derrière”, “Rockefeller” and “America”), in a Franglais voice halfway between Miss Piggy and the TV meerkat: “This is maximums accurate blurbs!”
Well, you don’t expect verisimilitude from a bunch of mass-produced air-headed dolls. Their lives, meanwhile, include rather more sex and drugs than you might imagine, and internecine intrigue, with a tangled subplot involving double-crossing and a heist of cherry-blossom powder (used for make-up, but also snorted as dollkind’s version of cocaine). But aside from Dolly, “myopic in her loyalties” and poignantly obsessed with protecting her “maman”, their love-triangles and machinations for the powder can feel insubstantial.
Despite McCarthy Woolf’s impressive way with verse forms, the most compelling parts are prose passages narrated by a 19th-century doll, the General, which give us something resembling a plot, via his recollections of his owners’ lives, including the enslaved plantation girl for whom he was originally made, who survives sexual abuse, runs away, and eventually becomes Lt Col Custer’s cook.
Top Doll is a strange picaresque, with its main players all trapped in one New York apartment. What does it all add up to? I’m not sure, but I’ve not read anything quite like it. And to ask for more than that would be “maximum ungratefuls” – as Dolly would say. TFS
Top Doll is published by Dialogue at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books