When a poem finishes with a triple rhyme of “mosaic”, “mosque” and “music”, (Coywolves); or leans back, with apparent insouciance, into a dishevelled cliche such as “when the grape crop / pretty much came a cropper” (The Rain), you know you’ve landed in the fantastically arrayed sound garden of a Paul Muldoon poem. Joy In Service on Rue Tagore (Faber, £14.99) is his 15th poetry collection and the voice here, parrying between being playful and deadly in earnest, is probably one of the most recognisable in contemporary poetry. Trademark linguistic “Muldynamics” are applied to subjects of conflict, loss, mortality and historical trauma, as well as to the more familiar tropes of music, food and individual objects observed with the kind of delighted acuity that describes an artichoke as being “armed to the teeth” or “gleaming like a hand grenade” (Pablo Neruda: ‘Ode to the Artichoke’).
It’s great fun, marvellously spry (as in the nifty villanelle At the Grave of Chang and Eng), and in no way reluctant to offer notes of lyric beauty alongside moments of outrage (about Putin’s war in Ukraine, for example), and the kind of metaphysical wit that ever delights in sharply-dressed metaphor (”one of its young / ticking like a watch / from a pocket of its waistcoat.”– Opossum).
That the poems here often remember other poems adds to their ludic quality: By The Time You Read This seems to glance back at Muldoon’s own Why Brownlee Left, as well as to the convention of poems masquerading as notes to the reader, (of which William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say may be the best-known example). This is a densely allusive book, as one might expect, that makes of its breadth of reference a carousel ride through epochs, touchstone poems and themes, with characteristic colour, brio and aplomb.
A parent’s alcoholic dementia might not seem the most promising of subjects but in Rory Waterman’s fourth poetry collection, Come Here To This Gate (Carcanet, £11.99), we’re in safe hands: his estranged father’s illness and death make for a sequence that combines candour, anger, kindness and humour, and doesn’t stint on any. That the father in question is Andrew Waterman (also a Carcanet poet), who died in 2022 and who, for three decades, taught English at the University of Ulster, Coleraine, adds to the mirroring effect. Descriptions of both the illness and the father-son relationship play themselves out between the confessional and the witness box, with the poems’ plainspeak and ping-ponging rhymed stanzas pitching us from heartfelt to artful, and from gentleness to piercing recrimination and regret, as in the final stanza of Home:
A novel exploration of the shared Gaelic heritage of Ireland and Scotland
The best crime fiction of 2024: Robert Harris, Jane Casey, Joe Thomas, Kellye Garrett, Stuart Neville and many more
Every Valley: The Story of Handel’s Messiah by Charles King – Not the work of a ‘lone genius’ but a collaborative achievement
Waking up to Christmas
So I watch the ridge of your forehead, feel my own –
for impulse or connection, which doesn’t come
until a nurse does, panting, to the door,
to tell us darlings we have five minutes more.
The collection’s title is a quotation from Ronald Reagan’s Brandenburg Gate speech in which he says “Mr Gorbachev, come here to this gate”, and the book is deeply engaged with borders and boundaries, and how they might be channelled, challenged or, perhaps, internalised. The second section begins, “Ciaran Doyle, inside his curfewed estate, / throws chunks of brick at Brits in armoured cars”, and other lines of demarcation both physical and metaphoric (the North/South Korean border; the class divide; victims and perpetrators), are scrutinised to yield a sidelong kind of portrait of England, with its squeeze on health and healthy relationships, its “ruined nametagged earth around our lives”. (ICN TO LHR) It could all be bleak and exhausting but isn’t, the pep of the language and visual fizz ensuring otherwise here.
In Katie Donovan’s May Swim (Bloodaxe, £12), an animating tension runs between the experience of loss and the possibility of salvage. Against poems of grief’s aftermath are set poems of small, defiant acts of healing. In Foxed, for example, when a mangey fox shows up in the garden, the poem responds:
I’ve had enough
of watching death win:
I took the challenge.
I reeled him in.
Other creatures fare similarly – a sodden bee, a wilting kitten, a trapped fly – the earnestness of the rescue attempts underlines the fragility of the ecosystem and our role in it. To be alive, these poems insist, is to care in ways howsoever minute and apparently pointless, the point being to keep faith with something crucially humanising, and to at least try to help.
In contrast, a sequence of poems concerning the collapse and death of the poet’s mother reminds us of the overwhelming absolute – what cannot be teased back to health with sugar drops or kindliness. Among the most powerful in the collection, with echoes of Louise Glück’s lyrical exactitude (My mother is still dead – Signs), these poems wisely deploy restrained, even stark, language to convey emotional impact. From First Aid:
It’s a Friday morning,
she had just
eaten scrambled egg,
in bed, said she felt
a little better,
ready to get up.
Next, we heard the crash.
Elsewhere, the language makes delightful use of fresh, sparky phrases (“I take a figary”; “my daughters rule the roost”; “what I got was a box in the head”) to talk back to the lived-in world of public events and current affairs: there are poems about buying a hybrid car, visiting her son at a Gaeltacht Irish College, the influx of young women from abroad in Home to Vote.
Generous, vivid and forthright, these are poems that cleverly balance tenderness with advocacy; resignation with commendable resolve.
Harry Josephine Giles’s Them (Picador, £10.99) writes into the transitional spaces and conditions of trans life.
Over the course of three consecutive iterations (two titled The New Woman; the third, The New Girl), a poem works through possible alternatives via erasure, strikeouts and experimental typography, ultimately settling on words and form. This isn’t just a transfer of edits into final copy: instead, the element of conscious curatorship and deliberate decision-making is germane to the collection’s central question of how bodies, identity and self-consciousness are to be framed and enacted.
It’s a question probed directly by many of the poems here, for example, May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?:
When I, a transsexual, hear a bird,
I am a transsexual hearing a bird;
when you hear a bird you are
a person hearing a bird. That is,
I am specific, you are general.
In keeping with the embodiment of identity, this is an unusually visual collection of poems incorporating photographs, a flow chart, play with marginalia and the knowing manipulation of shape into concrete poetry. Several poems seem to refuse to be read and must be processed as one might an abstract painting or collage. Indeed, the book is richly allusive, drawing on sources as diverse as Gender Reassignment Protocol, Wikipedia, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, and a packet of oestrogen.
It’s a complex collection – inventive, spiky and in possession of fiery energy. When Elegy, written for Brianna Ghey, asks “How dare a poem be? ... / I turn to words to turn your loss to less / than unspeakable”, we are reminded that these poems, no matter how playful or visually jaunty, are seriously committed to the questions of how poetry can help and what it’s for.
