Modern Poetry and Frank: Sonnets by Diane Seuss (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99 each)
One of the US’s most radical and important poets has finally found a home in the UK. Modern Poetry traverses Seuss’s uncertain youth and her discovery of literature, where, as a working-class woman, she notes that her poems are “Built on the edge of tradition, they will / rarely be anthologised”. Yet despite these pressures, “Out of the spigot / streams a thirsty noncompliance. An antisong.” Frank: Sonnets tells the rackety story of Seuss’s life, from a tough childhood in Michigan, through to New York, punk, addiction, motherhood, sex and death. These loose sonnets are a virtuosic journey through the vitality of poetry itself, what Seuss calls “the only father”, showing us its raw yet brilliant capacity for truth – “Is there nobility in poems? Let’s hope not. Nobility is another place to hide.” Seuss’s writing bristles with irreverent humour and wily energy, making much else in contemporary poetry seem insipid.
That Broke Into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott (Faber, £12.99)
Scott’s formally inventive second collection reckons with trauma and its aftermath through three luminous, uneasily beautiful sets of poems. The first uses the lapidary intensity of still-life paintings to explore the speaker’s complicated vulnerability, as in Still Life With Snail, Oyster, Spoon and Shallot Vinegar: “I’m the oyster. Quivery ashen gill. Cold jelly mess of a boy shucked wide open. Invertebrate. Raw.” The second ingeniously repurposes Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress to render the lasting imprint of abuse. The final sequence uses the glowing splendour of crystals as a tool to remember “those pre-trauma days, when life was as dazzling as a piece of raw peridot”, and to look to a hard-earned future where recovery might be possible, where “There is no abyss just this / immense patience”.
My Secret Life: Selected Poems by Krisztina Tóth, translated by George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, £12)
Tóth is part of the generation of Hungarian writers who came of age in 1989, as the optimism of post-communism gave way to economic crisis, alienation and political viciousness. Tóth’s selected poems, potently translated into English for the first time by George Szirtes, communicate the regretful atmosphere of melancholy that permeates a damaged society: “I’m familiar with the country, I have known / its trains, its weeping, its chlorine-coloured sky, / its acid rain, its long slow fall of snow, / its overdressed, pale babies.” These wide-ranging, droll poems always seem to come back to the knotty discomforts of a changing self existing within a broken world: “… one adapts and reinvents… / I’m somebody else today or simply elsewhere.” It is, in the end, painful transformation that fuels the work: “at the edge of the forest, in rotting humus / where somebody once was buried alive, / that’s where the poem begins”.
The Grimoire of Grimalkin by Sascha Aurora Akhtar (Prototype, £12.99)
This debut collection (originally published by Salt in 2007) thrillingly reworks the form of the grimoire, spellbooks created by occultists in the 16th century, to interrogate questions of gender, selfhood, colonial trauma and sexual freedom through experimental, electrically esoteric language. “Don a basque / made of a pirate’s flag & keep his severed / hand between your legs … naked best for a scramble in the bramble.” These darkly playful poems speak back to the controlling forces of patriarchy and hierarchy at the same time as celebrating the queasy vitality of the body and the weird, fierce potency of the material world: “A bat fried on the electric heater / starts to stink up the place. / Can you hear it? It’s bliss.”
Flood by Jessica Mookherjee (Nine Arches, £11.99)
This powerful collection delves into loss, sexual awakening, the power of the natural world, with a particular focus on the visceral experience of family life in all its forms. Of motherhood, Mookherjee writes: “I called you minnow, in those shambles of afterbirth / where I was splayed in mad shame. / I made rainbows from oil-slicked pools on the hospital / floor.” She renders the complicated inheritance of migration through deeply affecting imagery and description: “Stranger and strangeness, both cold and grey. Her sari billows in English winds, a pale / princess clutching her wedding gold.” Her poems reach into the past, speaking to those she has lost: “I build them a place to call home, all those dead relations, / many I didn’t know / I call out to them in Sanskrit, / in Mongolian, in gibberish. / One aunt I never met, strokes my hair and whispers, only the living are lonely for the dead.”
