Swell by Maria Ferguson (Penguin, £10.99)
“When I lost that first pregnancy it was / deliciously warm”: Ferguson has a deftly startling way with a line break. Wry wit and honesty combine to make Swell a compelling narrative of marriage, pregnancy and motherhood. One moment the poet is rapt with wonder at an umbilical cord “that seemed to keep on coming / like a phone-wire stretched up the stairs”; the next she is observing of her tired husband that “Today love is leaving him / in bed at 5am”. The world of mother and baby groups and “hashtag self-care” enables a rich vein of comic material, but it is emotional exposure and fragility (“we are just teenagers, / new to each other, my body undiscovered / in this foreign state”) that makes Swell such a rewarding collection.
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die by Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (Penguin Classics, £9.99)
While the fiction of Danish author Ditlevsen (1917-76) is well known in translation, her poetry has until now remained in its shadow. Bitter and dependable as a black coffee and a cigarette, these are hymns to desolation, disillusion, ennui and abandonment (“a childless mother / robbed of joy and grief, / clings to a dead lullaby / offering no relief”). Frustrated love is omnipresent (“I am a house someone has left, / Soon I’ll whisper the new owner’s name”). Feeling “devastated by a ragged tenderness” counts as a pretty good outcome, by Ditlevsen’s standards, and the reader comes away from these melancholy moments feeling pretty much the same.
Mind’s Eye: Notelets & Dialogues in Tribute to Paul Celan by Carol Rumens (Broken Sleep Books, £7.99)
“You made a garland of the coronach”, writes Carol Rumens, addressing Paul Celan. A complex dialectic of celebration and mourning runs through Mind’s Eye, a series of dialogues with the German-language poet. Rumens, who turned 80 in December, has long been adept at the cross-border exchanges of translation, especially from eastern European poetry. “Night. Figurehead. Sewage breath. Slimed ledge … ”: Rumens/Celan’s Pont Mirabeau is a far cry from the mellifluous celebrations of the same place by Guillaume Apollinaire. “Speak, you also”, Rumens/Celan addresses their poem, envisioning it as a “thin coat I wear / not quite to freeze my balls”. This is a book of grim and glorious consolations, a Winterreise reimagined.
Strange Beach by Oluwaseun Olayiwola (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Olayiwola is a choreographer as well as a poet and critic, and the poems of Strange Beach fairly skate across the page – after all, “speed / is of the utmost / importance when it comes to / time’s bold effects”. Calling a poem Greek Lesson After Anal is one way of getting the reader’s attention, but the piece signals two strong themes: the classical past and the hedonist passing moment. Here declarations of desire are “mere as children / following loose kites into stopless winds”. We might wonder about “crescendos of snow”, snow being silent, but Olayiwola’s knack for “finding the right note” makes him a poet, in Wallace Stevens’ phrase, of “ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds”.
Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko (Faber, £12.99)
With its image-rich and densely discursive textures, this UK debut from the American poet shows a strong affinity with the work of Amy Clampitt. Like Clampitt, Mlinko is drawn to hummingbirds – an “irreducible essence”. The lushness is late romantic; these poems’ “vintage is Keatsian”, loading every rift with ore. Muldoon-style callback repetitions are a feature, and help to drive the numerous sonnet sequences. Complex family history looms large, as in a poem on a grandmother trapped in a potato cellar for hours before “coming to light like a memory”, or All Souls’ Night, described as “words for the dead who raised me”. This is a big and imposing book, worldly wise but warmly open and giving.
