Will Burns’s debut collection Country Music showcased an original Home Counties kind of “High Lonesome” with more than a dash of Robert Lowell. Ancient Burial Ground (Corsair £10.99) builds on his light and lugubrious touch, poems mirroring themselves effortlessly as they evoke the quotidian, “Bastardised breakfast of eggs/and whatever else we had to hand,/then the present heavy-pressed and failing/us as we walk out on to the beach.” (Five Mile Road, Atlantic Coast).
The title poem’s pitch-perfect opening track, “Endless endgame commentary,/reason, reaction ... (radioed in),/and above it all a detuned human whistle./Kitchen harmonics/with back note of the MOD guns/giving it one final hell/” describes “Functional drift of obsolescence” of a town “Dying on its arse, says one of the pub landlords/ in accord with the other five …” Never has dying sprung from the page with such life.
Burns’s verse is as much home on the island of Jersey where the Great Green Bush Cricket blazes bright in Burns’s signature grass-green, “Big and bright as hell”. Its voice is a “dry-grass noise”. Music saturates every poem from Gob Iron (Scouse slang word for the harmonica) to the “military band experimental drone music”. (Reverberation). A few brushstrokes and a character appears in “mid-November, frosted playing field./A paunch in an old Juventus shirt,/touch in training still quality …” (Coach).
Burns’s home town Wendover is written off as “decommissioned community” before it develops “a literary festival,/an art gallery (unpretentious yet world class),/and more than one of those expensive hamburger chains /pegged on the memory of a small herd/made of scrap and cement/and left to ruminate just off the A422”. In Burns’s universe it’s never really over, as two fields “sacrificed for the new train line to the north” are peeled back revealing “a forgotten and unsuspecting subterranean army”. Or when he tweaks those famous Townes Van Zandt lyrics, “I am like everything else here –/waiting around, not necessarily to die…”.
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Polina Cosgrave’s Cargo (Gallery Press, €11.95) pins its colours to the mast with a Hannah Arendt epigraph “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and … perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political forces.” In Apologies, the unworldliness of Cosgrove’s love for her daughter is disarming, fresh and lyrical, “my daughter, enemy of all order –/not everything locked is worth opening. /… this is not for them to decide/how you use your key”.
Yet the paradox that drives all poetry is here too as the political raises its head in lines such as, “Trust me, once upon a time there was freedom/of speech, freedom of travel, freedom of thought. //Before our straitjackets got too cosy you could/ leave everything open: your door, your mind,/ your future, even your ripe blackberries of eyes.”
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Politics and the domestic spark against each other in Future Faking as Cosgrave imagines the quotidian messy morning of an autocrat’s death in powerful prescriptive lines, “watch that heavy ball of black light leave your body … Cry along with the child at the playschool entrance, call the mechanic to fix the engine … take a bite of that burned baguette: nothing will ever taste this good again”.
The stakes of love are scarily high for Cosgrave, “I would put this evening/where I’ve always kept/the most important items./My baby’s hospital tag …”, yet, “It can’t contain more than an eyeful of you.” Lists and repetition add up to many incantations, especially in Cargo, her strongest poem, where the stakes are raised high over the head of her sleeping child, “Every night I hear planes/flying over our house/I asked around, no one else is bothered /Every night I hear planes/flying over our house/Not once did they wake up my child/ smiling in her sleep.”
Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s Silver (Faber £12.99) is a reminder of its anagram “sliver” suggesting the in-between place where poetry hides “in plain sight” (A Brief History of Barcelona). In Nobody, he references Marianne Moore, likening poetry to “an orange bubble ripened/In the rain like real flowers in a field/Of memes or a meme in a field of real/Flowers”. while its title suggests Emily Dickinson.
From the opener The First and Final Poem, which is also the final poem, Phillips showcases an array of forms including blank verse, elegy, terza rima and rap. Throughout poems which include titles such as Ars Poetica and Biographia Literaria, Phillips argues for the lyric’s ability to make life meaningful and “To accept that poetry is older than reflex, that it predates intention … the breath your breath takes before you breathe” (Biographia Literaria).
Repetition, perhaps the old poetic device is central, reflecting the lament’s compulsion for return. Whether it’s the daring use of the same poem for the beginning and end or the reprinting of Prelude from his previous collection, “In the weeks between her death and being/Laid to rest, life became Covid-19./Both the living and the dead shared one air.”
Postlude follows Prelude, making another return to his grandmother’s death, this time in terza rima: “she saw it coming so she left, but my car was waiting downstairs, silver and fine-free, so I left. The rental purred when I turned
it on, and just like that she was gone”.
In Fantasia in a Time of Plague, the rhymes snap like cuffs, poetry is “séance … silence … science/Holed up in the hood … haring through the wood … still roars in your head/As the River Man said it would/On those sleepless nights //When you hear the living And the dead/Complicit as kites /Rhyming about civil rights”.
Camille Ralphs’s rewritings of the canonical prayers are both touching and wittily current
Camille Ralphs’s After You Were I Am (Faber, £10.99) recalls John Berryman, who was also inspired by Elizabethan language into making fresh lyrics from old material. Ralphs’s rewritings of the canonical prayers are both touching and wittily current – in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, there will be a time “to look a lobster in the long, stemmed eyes then choose it, this one,/to be boiled alive, and a time to rhyme ‘humanity’ with/ ‘manatee’; a time to lie here sadder than a loaded die, and a/ time to stack the diaries of the years against them like a leather /brickbat;”.
Her high affinity for the incantatory is especially suitable for the central monologues which recreate the Pendle witch trials of 1612, “I took the host and gulpd it down! nd led her imp/to hue n cry – to oathe to rupture me to fish/the limbs of Christ out semi-currdld frm/my poppopped gooseberry of belly ... " (James Device). The most affecting voice belongs to Jennet Device, a nine-year-old witness against the accused, raised more accusations of her own, including against her own family, “who but me can fathom this long fosse of a fam ly grave, unreeling //(grasse trapdooring down) … They r so Legion, auditor;/so winterlesse, in flocks of/foxgloves hocketing the hill – tolling as/ foreverly, as heavily n deadly,/as Hell’s bells. Please, forgive me”, (Jennet Device).
The third section stages the divine tragedy of Elizabethan magus John Dee. Ralphs’s notes for this section (and indeed the notes for Pendle trials) could be read on their own – the language as delicious as the narrative is compelling, “The odd term …'Abram-man’, means a mendacious type of beggar, one who gained from claims of lunacy, and is an instance of the cryptolect of the Elizabethan underground, called ‘pelting speech’ by Thomas Harman.” And “pelting” feels like a perfect description of Ralphs’s particular punkish poetry.
