Passion by David Morley (Carcanet, £12.99)
David Morley’s ardent, vividly alive latest collection draws on his Romany background and knowledge as an ecologist and naturalist. The poems weave the dynamism of the Romany language with English to celebrate our intimacy with the natural world’s vast mystery and beauty: “from elm top to hedgerow … from harebell to whitethroat: / Sorí simensar sí men, / Sorí simensar sí men.” (We are all one.) This evocative braid of language is also used to consider the aching cruelty of oppression – “The gavvers kettle the Travellers on the market square. / The locals stand by gawking, piss-taking” – as well as the defiant, quicksilver power of Romany language and community. “Nouns grew spry and spring-heeled /… words which Travellers / might ride, or hide behind from hard law /… But spoken language moves / like meltwater under ice. Speech thaws into life.”
Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets, edited by Rachael Boast (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
This anthology is a dizzying, continent-crossing explosion of verse, its topics and styles as individual as the poets; revelling in the diversity of a community that is often boxed in by ableism and prejudice. A potent theme of resisting limits courses through the book. Lateef McLeod’s poem pushes back against others’ definitions: “I am too pretty for your Ugly Laws, / too smooth to be shut in”, while Mishka Hoosen’s work celebrates the power and agency of those who think and live differently: “I am that howl / in the night ward. I am electric / without your help.” In a period in the UK when disabled people’s rights and living conditions are under threat, this collection feels timely. As Maya Abu-Hayyat suggests: “They will fall in the end, / those who say you can’t.”
So What by Frederick Seidel (Faber, £12.99)
So What energetically decries the spectre of death and the grinding indignities of illness and age facing the 89-year-old poet, while skewering the failures of the American empire and the west more widely. In the brilliant title poem, set in Claridge’s, the speaker describes a gilded bubble of privilege in a world of atrocity: “The marble shines like syrup. / So what they whip the marble with a riding crop / To keep the lava from Vesuvius away from us / And keep Pompeii plush and posh.” Seidel remains the toweringly enigmatic, ludic and at times offensive provocateur, yet his lyric abilities with image and line never lose their power: “My breath steamed up, / A foghorn of silence inflaming the air.” So when he writes, “Poetry is meaningless. / Poetry is a disgrace on a warm spring day”, it feels that, for all his effervescent bile, we should only half believe him.
In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles (Nine Arches, £11.99)
This luminous second collection is interested in the power of material creativity in all its forms, both within visual art and within the rich, often overlooked realms of fashion, textiles and fabric. The poet speaks of the subtle potency of clothing to shape the self and to chart memory, celebrating her Chinese-Malaysian heritage while rejecting others’ ignorance: “a gown can map a white orientalist’s dreamscape / a gown can trace the outline of a field from one’s childhood”. The book also deftly engages with the uneasy beauty of nature during a time of ecological crisis, drawing on her upbringing in Aotearoa New Zealand to create vividly unsettling images of a changing world. “It is both beautiful / and terrible / to understand the colours of a pacific coastal wildfire / wet lupine creamy aster drenched rhododendron crinkled / into pearly flame.”
Transfigurations: Collected Poems by Jay Wright (Penguin Classics, £14.99)
Finally, British readers can get to grips with a profoundly original, ambitious and globally minded writer. Wright’s lyrical, experimental verse traverses world traditions and beliefs, mining the heritage of his African ancestry alongside the influence of an upbringing in the American southwest, a fulcrum of American, Spanish and Navajo cultures. The poems offer a deep engagement with spiritual knowledge and myth: “I see the God himself dance/ and turn about himself/ like the stars he moves…” They also explore the vigour of ritual, and how it might lead to personal and communal transformation: “in the order of these acts, / I take your presence upon me. /…I have been trying to create a language/ to return what you have lost /… a language to return you to yourself.” Despite their variety, these dazzling, questing poems are always seeking to discover how a collective selfhood and identity might come into being.