The best recent poetry – review roundup
In The Stone Age (Picador) Shetland-based Jen Hadfield provides a vivid portrait of the landscape of her home, while also showing how neurodiversity can lead to new slants, insights and metaphors when viewing the world. Songs of “Deep Time” jostle with reminders of our transience: “But humankind / are brief, soft // fireworks, prone / to go off at a moment’s / notice”. The landscape is filled with an unexpectedly playful inventiveness, typographical as well as verbal; stones speak, ravens fly upside down as they become ideas, razor clams are buried giants’ fingernails, emotions become bigger in the big country. What’s most captivating is how Hadfield brings sensations to life; subtle and propulsive, her language fizzes and dashes “in little surges like rills of clear pleasure”. The poems more often than not end with a dash, rather than full stops – warm, open invitations to revel in the spaces they make.
The Mermaid’s Purse (Bloodaxe), the 16th collection by Fleur Adcock, is a disparate set of dispatches, traversing the seas of New Zealand as well as alighting closer to home. There is little that escapes Adcock’s eye, from the doomed fate of small mammals and birds in her back garden, to exhibitionist behaviour at Christmas parties or the supposed heroics we rely on to get us through our lives. Old age and death are here too – the book closes with a long sequence dedicated to the poet Roy Fisher – but handled with the deftest of touches: “Finial. It sounds like a fancy, / over-decorated word for ‘final’. / Lightning is the least of my worries.” What unites the poems is Adcock’s tone, at once beguiling yet with plenty of bite among the pleasantries, which knows that wisdom often comes best wrapped in disguise as a joke.
That laughter can blind us to the reality of our current economic system is one of the themes driving Holly Pester’s debut Comic Timing (Granta Poetry). How we work, live and consume are her targets, and she is adept at finding moments of supposed normality which are anything but, best articulated in the Forward prize-nominated title poem: “I could be creative but / I am beginning / to think stuck linguistically / awkward to material or reality”. Pester’s voice is by turns bleak, bathetic, Beckettian; the insidious, stuttering energy of her phrase-making and line breaks contributing to the unsettled feeling that ranges across the book. This is poetry that finds a jittery music in the contradictions and pressures placed on our psyches: “as long as you’re happy / I don’t have to worry // say anything / yes // wrong answer / a stress”.
“Bro!” With that declaration Maria Dahvana Headley’s radical translation of Beowulf (Scribe) sets out to make you look again at the Norse epic. Headley’s version has the brio of someone grandstanding at a bar, thrilling the audience with tales wild and tall. Raids on Old English and contemporary “word hoards” provide a distinct vocabulary, where warriors become “made men”, “smoking guns” are found among the swords, and even a “hashtag: blessed” appears. Allied to a cunning ear for alliteration, this makes for a text of rollicking, restless verve. The masculine boasting, besting and butchering are duly in place, but Headley adds a sharp focus on the actions and motivations of the female characters. If you’ve ever struggled with the poem, this is the retelling for you, its ferocious clarity turning Beowulf into a Hollywood superhero: “Your body’s made of steel, your mind mercury, / your tongue gold”.
• Rishi Dastidar’s latest collection, Saffron Jack, is published by Nine Arches (£9.99).
