In “After Amergin”, Michael Longley embarks on a vigorous riff displaying the elemental reach of his art: “I am the night-flying whimbrel / That whistles down the chimney”. In turning variations on Amergin, Longley is referencing Robert Graves, who also featured that Old Irish bard; and here in The Candelight Master (Cape, £10), as so often, Longley is honouring his historical debts in a multi-layered way. One of these layers is his earlier self, and in “A Grasshopper” present-day Longley’s voice gives way to a translation of Anacreon produced in his 20s, while in “Maisie’s Poem” he introduces some lines on the first world war by his granddaughter. Exegi monumentum aere perennius, wrote Horace, and with more than 50 years of publishing behind him Longley has built up a monumental legacy of his own. Yet burnished though these poems are, they remain teemingly alive. Any talk of monuments is thankfully premature.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen has become one of the most discussed poetry books of the last decade. At 340 pages, Just Us: An American Conversation (Allen Lane, £25) addresses its unfinished business with epic ambition. There is a sense of battle fatigue in the face of the racial violence of American life (“How is a call to change named shame, / named penance, named chastisement?”). The question of genre in Rankine’s work remains challenging. There is some verse here, but not much; more often she writes in something closer to a prose poem’s hallucination of memoir or academic prose, alternating between personal testimony and structural analysis. In few other poets writing today does the weight of the world weigh so heavily.
Watching a tedious boxing match in Hull, Philip Larkin turned to a friend with the words “Only connect”. It’s a mantra with equal appeal for David Morley and the subject of one of his poems, heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury. The poems of FURY (Carcanet, £10.99) are acts of radical connection across cultures and language. At some point a moratorium on British poets writing about John Clare will have to be considered, but Morley pulls it off with aplomb in “Kop Kop to his Horses He Sings and No More”, in which Clare and “the Gypsy” bond over their love of horses. The dialectal richness of Clare’s poems is matched by Morley’s use of Romany, as in ecstatic lists of birds and plants. FURY comes with a hard political edge too, in elegies for cultural loss: “All the nameless people named here. / The story ends with who we were.”
Family history is at the heart of Pascale Petit’s Tiger Girl (Bloodaxe, £10.99), the story of her grandmother, born in Rajasthan to her father’s maid but brought up as his wife’s child. In “The Umbrella Stand” childhood games with a relic from India turn serious when the poet learns she is playing with the hide of an elephant on which her father hunted tigers. Like Morley, Petit is a passionate laureate of the natural world, but alive to the cruelty of human depredation, as when she encounters a man sewing an owl’s eyes shut. The urge to howl in protest collides with feelings of impotence, until “with resin from the tree of love / I glued my lips.” Reclamation and guilt refuse to be extricated: if a poem is a memory of her father bringing home a fish, it is also a memory of the unfortunate fish and how “her eyes still glare at me as I gut her.”
