Eleanor Hooker's Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus, €12.50) opens with Redwing, "newly dead –/ feather and frame round blown glass./It felt transgressive…to inspect". Inside the poet's ribcage, a "hummingbird turns the key". Typically, Hooker is "…fearful I will fall through its song" yet perseveres in her investigation of strange tantalising histories while the dead hang around, more alive than ever:
Dad is by the hearth, encouraging ash back to life.
I've never lived in a house that held its heat I tell him,
unable to say I miss you in case he recollects
his death. Somewhere in the house
a child is crying. Find her, he says.
(When You Dream of the Dead)
Poems call to each other between pages – here the dead child returns, worked against the vision of horse and the deceptively plain writing burns deep:
Your partner lies on the bed beside you, your foreheads touch.
You hear the talk beyond the curtain –
sedate her, we don't do caesars for dead babies.
(Ossuary)
Motherhood is not always tragic; the typically ludic My Mother as a Cryptic Crossword begins its series of riddles in delight, “Begin to jump/START we began from you, out of your well. A vision of the poet as honey bee, with nods to Sylvia Plath and Robert Bly is playfully concrete, airborne:
one hung in the still air, /
hummed above my crib, its saddlebags
yellow laden…
(Legion)
Yet Hooker's key element is the earth, resting in a potato furrow, remembering nursing "Paudie…mud and grit around his mouth… His sister knew enough to make him eat the earth,/to check the fires…weed-killer burning…I coax him to eat the Fuller's Earth…" Hooker's ultimate manifesto comes from the ground where the rock is envisioned as "a hand that grips…roots me in the vernacular of the earth."
(Eating the Earth)
Raymond Antrobus's All the Names Given (Picador, £9.99) drills down into the Norse surname of Antrobus (also a village in Cheshire). His mother is more centre stage, "holding her head higher at seventy", while his father continues to haunt – especially in Heartless Humour Blues which returns to the circular refrains that characterised his father poems in The Perseverance. "My mother says my father had a heartless sense of humour./ That winter she fell, ice on the road…/He watched from the kerb – boozy red-eyed Dad – laughed when she said he had a heartless sense of humour./I think that's how he handled pain."
Meanwhile Antrobus is leaping gracefully into new forms, punctuating sections with captions inspired by deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim who “rewrites captioned text from films in order to revise the listening experience from hearing centric to deaf centric”. There are fine poems for his partner Tabitha providing warm relief alongside the loneliness of poems about race and disability such as In Sutton Road Cemetery:
Earlier, when he'd found the grave of his great-grandmother
by the elderberry tree it was the one time he'd wanted
someone white to appear and ask
where he was from. It would've been no skin off him
to point at her stone and say
here.
One of Antrobus’s greatest gifts lies in the way he expresses loneliness with courage and humour so that a particular life can be understood, its urgent code concrete and pressing:
There are no hymns for deaf boys.
But who can tell
we're deaf without speaking to us?
(For Tyrone Givans)
Gail McConnell's The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, £9.99) conveys its experimental, powerfully felt nature in its off-kilter title.
Continuing the formal play begun in Fothermather, words which swam around the open sea of the page are compressed here. Predominantly box-shaped prose poems hold literally explosive material as the poet sifts through a box of archives relating to her father William McConnell, assistant governor of the Maze prison. While checking underneath his car for incendiary devices, he was shot in front of his wife and the three-year-old child in 1984.
The opening places us on the spot, “BEGIN WITH THE VICTIM on his/ back is how this begins”. These are William’s own words taken from his Queens University student diary. “God made the sun…”. Biblical text jostling beside newspapers extracts and official reports is almost unbearably poignant as the child speaks:
night and day he made and trees
and peas and wendy houses
tricycles sunglasses that go snap
let there be light let lights appear
and let the air be filled with birds
the little hinge that moves their legs…
Can a child ever feel safe again?
dream about a man in a car
engine his head sticking out the
car ramming into doors him
going into them head first when
he stands up there's no top on
his head…
McConnell exponentially expands that theme of safety; the poet sitting at her computer, saving a document, “Save as template”, to the idea of salvation, “redemption from sins” and finally, devastatingly to the “safe house” protecting the killers:
the stuff of thrillers wigs washed
in the kitchen sink two pairs
of rubber gloves burnt in the
yard the briefcase tucked up in
the attic sub-machine gun snug
inside clean towels for everyone
the spinner going on third
time that afternoon.
"Only a girl stands strong/like a mountain, when facing fear," Parwana Fayyaz's mother predicts that she will give birth to a girl after seeing a scorpion crawl "across her pregnant belly" in The Scorpion, this baby becomes Shamama, Sun-glare, one of dozens of evocative Afghan names running like a river of witness throughout Forty Names (Carcanet, £10.99). The quality described in the women's names, Patience Flower, The General, The King, Aunt Quietude and Grandmother Lion show us just how strong these "girls" need to be in the oral stories passed down from Fayyaz's grandmothers, mother, aunts.
The haunting title poem Forty Names tells the story of 40 young women shot in a cave. We know their names but not why they died, grief is expressed in their naming and the cinematic vision of that mountain place, their dresses animated, “a herd of colours”.
Colours and fabric intensify the poems’ folkloric sense, “Into exile… my mother carried her box of sewing needles,/and her Butterfly sewing machine made in the USSR…” (Sewing Needles). Fayyaz’s mother, Roqeeya, makes dresses for her three daughters, “in pistachio, red-rose, and sea-green”, advocating female independence, “A woman with an idea and a wallet…Be independent. Earn your own money./Keep your face red and your name green.” (Roqeeya)
But although the women endure, they rarely escape. Aunt Quietude, educated and talented, has her “girlhood taken from her…sent to Turkistan” because a “man…was thought to have touched her hands one night”.
One of the finest poems is Durrani, rooted in folktale yet uncomfortably real. Village women put their children to bed, they talk of a fox, a wolf, men sit up all night with shotguns. They recite Surahs from the Quran while Durrani sings outside – a Pashtun woman who dishonoured her family by falling in love with a Hazara man, finding “solace…those nights /lit by candles left in the cemetery,/ by her forbidden love.” And yet, here is this book of poems – independent (as Fayyaz’s mother would want) and timely, a lyrical act of witness.
