Kayo Chingonyi’s second collection, A Blood Condition (Chatto, £10), takes its title from an unnamed illness that claimed the lives of his parents when he was a young adult. A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London. In “Hyem”, we learn of the young poet’s Geordie speech being interpreted as “demotic Bemba” in Zambia. “Postcard from the Sholebrokes” addresses another Newcastle poet, Tony Harrison, and “The last night of my 20s” is an affecting elegy for the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden. “Origin Myth” is a skilful series of seven linked sonnets on the legacies of illness and bereavement; “Acquaintance with the night has its uses”, Chingonyi writes, echoing Robert Frost’s “I have been one acquainted with the night”. These fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we might “carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith”.
Frederick Seidel turns 85 this year, and with New Selected Poems (Faber, £18.99) we have a chance to weigh up half a century of his oeuvre. Hyperbole and shock tactics have long been central to his art. Often he will begin a poem with an outrageous statement such as “I want to date-rape life”; then, as we roll our eyes at the provocation, he will relax into wistful odes to vintage motorbikes or his favourite London tailor. Other targets include suicide bombers, the decline of the west, and women (“a naked woman my age is just a total nightmare”). Readers who fail to laugh at all this can only be proof of a prime Seidel article of faith, that you can’t say anything these days – unless of course you’re Frederick Seidel.
The protagonist of Luke Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets (Penned in the Margins, £9.99) meets a man at a party who claims to be able to recite any Shakespeare sonnet from memory. How about number 66? “Not 66”, he replies, “Anything but that.” With a line from a sonnet introducing each prose poem, we get a Shakespeare recital of sorts in this joyously unclassifiable book. The party drags on: tedious conversations are endured and escaped, a Bible study group randomly convenes, and the meaning of love thrashed out, often via the sonnets. “We will give each other a disease to which we alone are the cure,” the narrator announces, which seems both trite and brilliant at once, like many a party conversation. “You want to disappear into the night with all the apology of a firework,” we read as the end of the party approaches, a perfect epitaph for the book itself.
The poems of Tishani Doshi’s A God at the Door (Bloodaxe, £10.99) operate on the grand scale, reaching for visionary responses to their often troubling subjects. They etch articulate outrage deftly on to ecological backdrops; the grubby human world of political and misogynistic violence is rendered in images of an orchard detonating “its crimson fruits, / its pomegranates and poppies and tart mulberries” in a besieged Kabul maternity clinic. A poem shaped like a menstrual cup skewers Pliny the Elder, that “Big Daddy of Mansplainers”, and everywhere these poems are caustic and comic in turn, “unbelted, unbuttoned”, shimmering and bright. Though “hope is a booby trap” in the war-ravaged landscapes, it is nevertheless offered up and renewed throughout this stunning and ambitious collection – “How all this sadness builds like a raga to bring / on rain, which the girl rushes into of course.”
“what els coalt enticed me to this / desolate country/ ?”, begins Yvonne Litschel’s poem “historical inaccuracy”. Crossing Lines: An Anthology of Immigrant Poetry (Broken Sleep, £7.99) collects short selections from 29 writers, many of whose names – Emma Filtness, Isabelle Baafi, Lady Red Ego, Mizzy Hussain, L Kiew – will be new to readers. “i have // always been here”, insists Michelle Penn’s “Precarious”, asserting the historic as well as the contemporary presence of the immigrant poet on these shores. Movement between languages as well as countries is a recurrent theme. The speaker of Maia Elsner’s “Goldfinch” ends by wondering “what part of you / I lose each day / to another language, another song”. Much is lost, but much is preserved and vindicated in this welcome anthology.
