Bright Fear by Mary Jean Chan (Faber, £10.99)
“I am asked why my poems are so clear. I’ll confess: / it’s what happens when you want to be understood.” Other people matter a lot in Chan’s poetry, and many poems in Bright Fear, a follow-up to the Costa-winning Flèche, negotiate anxieties about recognition and misrecognition by parents, strangers, white people and possibly the poet’s therapist. Chan says “I migrate between cities and selves”, and the book captures the painful cost of multiple geographical and linguistic migrations as it moves between Britain and Hong Kong, English and Cantonese. Juxtaposing the 2003 Hong Kong Sars outbreak with the Covid-19 pandemic, Chan reports racist threats and microaggressions, in which “whiteness greets me / like a stopping device”. The most inquiring poems are in the last section, Field Notes on a Family, where Chan writes movingly about home and “unhomeliness”, exploring the difficult silences between mother and daughter, traditional values and queerness. Scrupulously self-investigative, Chan’s diary-like prose poems and plain-speaking lyrics maintain “a sense of / critical distance” between materials and feelings: “All fear is grief: how my mother wants / me home, how tears come on like poems.”
So to Speak by Terrance Hayes (Penguin, £12.99)
Hayes is a maestro of poetic forms and these poems sing with a musical dexterity that embraces vulnerability and ambiguity. His seventh collection opens with a tree frog that “overcomes its fear of birds by singing”, in a profound meditation on fatherhood and the history of racial violence. Elsewhere, by “picturing a brood of boll weevils migrating to the US”, the speaker discovers “solace, survival, multiple genres of longing”, and concludes that “what unsettles my country can also unsettle me. / Sometimes fear tells us exactly where we are heading.” The book is an eclectic collection of fantastical fables, “do-it-yourself sestinas” about paintings and tight-knit quatrains recording “the Kafka virus”. It reads like an ambitious mixed-media project questioning the role of art in representing suffering: “If you see suffering’s potential as art, is it art or suffering? / If you see life’s potential as art, is it artful or artificial living?” Soul-searching questions ripple through a series of electrifying American Sonnets about James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia E Butler, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone, reimagining the works and voices of many black cultural icons.
A ‘Working Life’ by Eileen Myles (Grove Press UK, £12.99)
“The writing / so cool: / Eileen / is motion / one thought / floated / to the next / swarms of it”. Ruthlessly unguarded, surgically self-parodic and infinitely funny, Myles’s poems chop lines into uncanny units and place our lexicons under an X-ray, turning the familiar into the unfamiliar. Myles evokes the absurd grace of mundane life – coffee, dog, toilet, ex-lover, refrigerator, T-shirt, cat, books, therapy, toaster – but among these quotidian objects and companions, there’s always a spark of surprise, as the sharp philosophical lines stop us in our tracks: “Everything’s stone / in the name of god”, “I like the inexactness / of cabs, the cash / the entire ana / log experience”, “coffee’s like / music I thought about / quitting in the future / for the better orgasm”. The many first names in the poems (Joan, Tasha, Casper, Amy, Erin …) aren’t accidents but evoke an intimate web, an “invisible / part of friendship” that gives the poems a remarkable narrative range. An indispensable book about friendship and intimacy; I alternately laughed and shivered as I turned the pages.
Devotions by Mary Oliver (Corsair, £30)
Carefully curated by Oliver before her death in 2019, this generous selection travels back in time from Felicity (2015) to No Voyage and Other Poems (1963). “Like finches sifting through a dream”, Oliver selected her poems judiciously to conjure the dreamscape of our natural world. At 480 pages, Devotions is a mighty book from a prolific US poet whose primary concern is the human chain connecting our species and habitats: “The slippery green frog / that went to his death / in the heron’s pink throat / was my small brother”. It showcases Oliver’s sustained consistency of tone, style, craft and subject matter. Everywhere we find friendly, inquisitive, down-to-earth poems about birds, dogs, cats, oaks, herons, sunflowers – and God, mornings and seashores. It’s important to remember that many of Oliver’s poems predate the commercialisation of mindfulness, eco-poetry and environmental philosophy. Her poetry is unafraid of ambiguity – “Think about what it is that music is trying to say” – and asks us to consider the affinity between “a simple / neighbourhood event” and “a miracle”.
We Play Here by Dawn Watson (Granta, £12.99)
A gritty verse-fiction set in north Belfast in 1988, We Play Here records the tough, distinctive voices of four 12-year-old girls in an overheated climate of bomb scare and bonfires, where “Men died / there every summer and were found swinging by kids”. The girls are caught up in gangland turf-wars and rampant land developments, trying to carve out their own space in a neighbourhood like “a jumbo box of ghosts built / for old people”. The kids roam the estate with pride and fear, in the shadow of domestic violence, making sense of a fragmented world. Watson revisits the familiar territory of the Troubles with mixed results. While the young, hyper-observant protagonists provide potentially strong characterisation, the elliptical imagistic style often punctuates rather than propels their stories. Nevertheless, with tenderness and defiance, Watson has created a fearless poem about open wounds and broken childhoods. As a speaker observes: “Make sure to cut your hair as short as you want. / And tell your future girl I said look after you.”
• Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection is The Ink Cloud Reader (Carcanet, £12.99)
