The best recent poetry collections – review

May 9, 2020, 2:00 am

≫ Next: 'I came face to face with Dennis Nilsen': poet laureate Simon Armitage

How to Wash a Heart by Bhanu Kapil; Saffron Jack by Rishi Dastidar; The Atlas of Lost Beliefs by Ranjit Hoskote; and Shine, Darling by Ella Frears

Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion, £9.99) responds with brilliant acuity to the prolonged stress of the immigrant experience. In an affectingly claustrophobic second-person address, the immigrant speaker talks to her white, middle-class, liberal host. Despite the host’s “contra-regime” politics and assurances that “What’s mine is yours”, the power dynamic is steeped in inequality; everything is done on the host’s terms, and “there’s no law / That requires / What you’re offering me to last”. In this house – or in the nation state in which the immigrant is forced into the role of constant guest – the speaker is subtly undermined, turned into a “pet” and her rights amended accordingly. The host interrupts the speaker, polices her interactions, finds and reads aloud her diary. Hospitality is conditional: the performance of generosity is hollow. In this series of precise, destabilising poems, Kapil skilfully amplifies the pressured immigrant heart, showing how precarious it is to exist in colour in a white space.

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'I came face to face with Dennis Nilsen': poet laureate Simon Armitage

May 9, 2020, 10:55 pm

≫ Next: 'Love and desire': how erotic poetry is helping Afghans through lockdown

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The former probation officer tells Desert Island Discs of the time he was in ‘a tiny room’ with the serial killer

The poet laureate Simon Armitage has spoken of his encounter with the notorious serial killer Dennis Nilsen and his unsatisfying time as a probation officer in a candid Desert Island Discs radio interview aired on Sunday.

The Yorkshireman was appointed as Britain’s 21st national poet a year ago.

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'Love and desire': how erotic poetry is helping Afghans through lockdown

May 11, 2020, 1:15 am

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Of Bronze — and Blaze (319) by Emily Dickinson

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A new generation of poets in Afghanistan is exploring the physical side of love – and isolation is their inspiration

It has been weeks in lockdown for Hoda Khamosh, but the 23-year-old has managed to stick to a routine. This includes sitting down in the afternoons to write poetry, mostly with an erotic spin to it.

In the absence of touch and seeing friends and loved ones, she – along with many others – has turned to erotic poetry, convinced that, “it will help to get through these difficult days”.

Love poetry has been one of the most cherished aspects of the millennium-old Persian poetic tradition

In the last two decades, it has become more direct. People talk about their desires; their bodies

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Poem of the week: Of Bronze — and Blaze (319) by Emily Dickinson

May 11, 2020, 3:26 am

≫ Next: Poetry book of the month: Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt – review

≪ Previous: 'Love and desire': how erotic poetry is helping Afghans through lockdown

This fizzing response to seeing the Northern Lights steps carefully around cosmic visions

319

Of Bronze — and Blaze —
The North — tonight —
So adequate — it forms —
So preconcerted with itself —
So distant — to alarms —
An Unconcern so sovereign
To Universe, or me —
Infects my simple spirit
With Taints of Majesty —
Till I take vaster attitudes —
And strut upon my stem —
Disdaining Men, and Oxygen,
For Arrogance of them —

My Splendors, are Menagerie —
But their Competeless Show
Will entertain the Centuries
When I, am long ago,
An Island in dishonored Grass —
Whom none but Daisies — know.

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Poetry book of the month: Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt – review

May 12, 2020, 1:00 am

≫ Next: Top 10 books about Iran | Nazanine Hozar

≪ Previous: Poem of the week: Of Bronze — and Blaze (319) by Emily Dickinson

An inspirational, uplifting and assured debut collection, reflecting on nature and mortality

It is extraordinary to encounter a debut collection that feels as established as Seán Hewitt’s – and not in a willed or derivative way. These unmediated poems are, at the same time, charged: they pull you in swiftly, you become immersed. Hewitt revises Wordsworth’s idea of poetry as emotion “recollected in tranquillity” with the suggestion that recollection is secondary to the present moment. I even entertained the glorious illusion that these are poems that are being written and read in the same instant. In Tongues of Fire, the title piece and last in the collection, the present is burning. It is an exceptionally moving poem – impossible to read without a lump in the throat. Hewitt tries to make sense – all at once – of his father’s dying, the nature of divinity and what it is to be mortal.

In passing, he observes a fungus consuming a juniper, its fiery horns presenting themselves for comment, offering themselves up as biblical – as “Pentecostal flame”. Their blighted beauty ties in with his father’s cancer. Grief is here the engine that drives perception. At every point, what Hewitt sees is rinsed through by what he feels. He grafts the people and circumstances of his life on to nature with unerring brilliance and yet is, at the same time, mindful that he may be finding symbols only because he needs to find them. He acknowledges the possibility of artistic opportunism and then writes his way convincingly past it.

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Top 10 books about Iran | Nazanine Hozar

May 13, 2020, 6:55 am

≫ Next: Florence Pugh and Simon Armitage record lockdown poem together

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From memoirs and history to verse and fiction, the best writing about Iran has a uniquely poetic touch

Iran is an ancient country with a complex people, among them some of the greatest poets who ever lived. Sadly, the Iranian novel has yet to reach the popularity of the country’s poetry. This is perhaps because there is something enigmatic about how Persian prose is written, often using surrealism and magical realism to mimic the playfulness in its poetry. No matter what Iranians do, even if they write historical textbooks, it seems they can never shed the poetic touch.

Related: Top 10 political travel books

Aria by Nazanine Hozar is published by Viking in the UK and Pantheon in the US. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15.

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Florence Pugh and Simon Armitage record lockdown poem together

May 13, 2020, 9:00 pm

≫ Next: The best books and audiobooks of 2020 so far

≪ Previous: Top 10 books about Iran | Nazanine Hozar

Collaboration is a recording of the poet laureate’s Lockdown set to music, with proceeds donated to the domestic abuse charity Refuge

Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, has joined forces with the actor Florence Pugh for a charity release of his poem about coronavirus crisis. Lockdown, first published in March, has been set to music and will be sold to help raise money for the domestic abuse charity Refuge.

It features Armitage and Pugh reading the lines to music that starts ominously, and becomes more hypnotic and euphoric. Armitage has been making tracks of his poems with collaborators Richard Walters and Patrick J Pearson, collectively known as LYR, for a couple of years. The involvement of Pugh – nominated at the Oscars and Baftas for her role in Little Women this year – was wonderful, he said. “She brings such intelligence and crackle.”

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The best books and audiobooks of 2020 so far

May 13, 2020, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Poems to get us through: 'Hello mum!' from a loo high above London

≪ Previous: Florence Pugh and Simon Armitage record lockdown poem together

Hilary Mantel’s trilogy was finished at last, Blake Gopnik exposed Warhol’s private life and Richard E Grant brought new life to Iris Murdoch. Here are our highlights of the year to date

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Poems to get us through: 'Hello mum!' from a loo high above London

May 13, 2020, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Thanks for Marina Hyde, George Monbiot and Guardian letters | Brief letters

≪ Previous: The best books and audiobooks of 2020 so far

In this week’s poetry choice by Carol Ann Duffy, a daughter uses a bathroom light to communicate with her mother 50 floors below and half a city away

London-based Ella Duffy’s first pamphlet, New Hunger, is published this month by Smith/Doorstop Books – indefatigable ushers-in of verse debuts. The London described in the poem is one we can currently only yearn for, but the sorrow of distance seems to speak to us now, in our separated families, as we Skype and FaceTime through our isolations. As the mother referred to here, this poem has a special poignancy for me.

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Thanks for Marina Hyde, George Monbiot and Guardian letters | Brief letters

May 14, 2020, 10:01 am

≫ Next: 'Solace and healing': Ireland turns to poetry to ease lockdown strain

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Cheering content at a difficult time | EE Cummings | Tennis etiquette | Uses for tights

I have just lost my dear wife of 54 years to the cruel disease that is Alzheimer’s. Both I and my five adult children are deep in grief. I must thank the Guardian today (13 May), and specifically Marina Hyde for her wonderful wry sense of humour that kept me laughing throughout, George Monbiot for some actual positive suggestions going forward at this very difficult time, and those who wrote and chose the selection of letters. You have all cheered me up, thank you.
Brian Stephens
Hereford

• As a former English teacher I always enjoy the direct style of EE Cummings’ poetry. But as a former politician I had always thought his two-line poem – “a politician is an arse upon / which everyone has sat except a man” unfair to politicians. And then along came Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.
David Lepper
MP for Brighton Pavilion, 1997-2010

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'Solace and healing': Ireland turns to poetry to ease lockdown strain

May 17, 2020, 3:32 am

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Ambala by Shanta Acharya

≪ Previous: Thanks for Marina Hyde, George Monbiot and Guardian letters | Brief letters

Social media is awash with quotes, poets read verses over the phone and households make banners of their favourite lines

More than 1,000 people have died and the long lockdown, which begins to ease from Monday, has kept others apart, but Ireland has found at least one comfort in the time of coronavirus: poetry.

New poems are being commissioned and performed and old poems are being rediscovered in a nation long synonymous with the written word.

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Poem of the week: Ambala by Shanta Acharya

May 18, 2020, 4:08 am

≫ Next: How to write 1,000 poems in 1,000 days

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Two young women’s deep-felt friendship begins at college before a struggle with traumatic injury is revealed

Ambala

She burst into my room dancing, humming,
a force of nature, her dark skin gleaming,

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How to write 1,000 poems in 1,000 days

May 18, 2020, 4:00 am

≫ Next: Michael McClure obituary

≪ Previous: Poem of the week: Ambala by Shanta Acharya

From limericks about armed coups to haiku about football transfers, Nick Asbury reflects on his long project to write fast poetry on his phone

For the past 1,000 days, I’ve been writing at least one poem a day. I started on 17 August 2017 as a terrorist attack was unfolding in Barcelona. I was alone in a pub (standard for poets) and found myself writing a few lines on my phone. I posted it on Instagram, where I explained that I was experimenting with writing fast poems. That experiment is now wildly out of control.

It may not be the healthiest pursuit. It requires daily engagement with the details of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, school shootings, celebrity deaths, sporting events and the slow plotlines of Brexit, Trump and climate change – and now there’s a pandemic to write about. Even so, there are days when it feels as if either the news or my mind has slowed to a standstill. It has helped that “Tuesday” rhymes with “quiet news day”.

Two volumes of Nick Asbury’s Realtime Notes are available here.

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Michael McClure obituary

May 19, 2020, 9:07 am

≫ Next: Poems to get us through: 'I thought about drilling a hole in my head'

≪ Previous: How to write 1,000 poems in 1,000 days

US writer who saw himself and his fellow Beat poets as the literary wing of the green movement

Michael McClure was one of the six poets who took part in the reading on 7 October 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that announced the arrival of the Beat generation. Performing his poem For the Death of a Hundred Whales, which commemorated an act of slaughter by bored GIs stationed at an Icelandic Nato base, McClure declared his dominant concern with the animal consciousness in man rendered dormant by industrialisation.

Describing the ethos of that night, a watershed in American culture at which Allen Ginsberg first presented Howl, McClure, who has died aged 87, wrote: “We were locked in the cold war and the Asian debacle. The country had the feeling of martial law … We saw that the art of poetry was essentially dead – killed by war, by academies, by neglect, by lack of love, and by disinterest. We knew we could bring it back to life … We wanted voice and we wanted vision.”

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Poems to get us through: 'I thought about drilling a hole in my head'

May 20, 2020, 8:25 am

≫ Next: 'A joyful thing': the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years

≪ Previous: Michael McClure obituary

In this haunting work chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, the phases of the visiting moon trigger strange desires and inexplicable feelings in Ella Frears’ narrator

There could not be a better time to support small presses and new voices in poetry by buying their books and pamphlets. The poet and visual artist Ella Frears’ new collection is a Poetry Book Society recommendation for this summer. We may yet find ourselves performing some of the beautifully strange, moon-driven actions of her haunting poem.

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'A joyful thing': the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years

May 21, 2020, 2:06 am

≫ Next: Scottish national poet Jackie Kay talks about racism she endured as a child

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Actor Peter Gordon wrote verse for his wife Alison for two decades, and has continued since she died. Now 87, his family has set up a website, A Love in Verse, to share his poetry

Thirty years ago, “just for a laugh”, actor Peter Gordon wrote a poem for his wife Alison, and left it under her pillow. She liked it, and so he carried on, every day for 25 years. To this day, Gordon continues to add to the thousands of poems he had written for Alison, even after her death four years ago.

“She was quite amused by it, both charmed and flattered, as I had hoped, and I went on from there to turning it into little rhymes and then the rhymes got bigger and bigger and I started doing it every day. So it became a custom,” says Gordon, now 87, from lockdown at his home in Sunbury, where he lives with one of his daughters. “I was out of work sometimes, or hanging about in the dressing room, so it was something for me to do, and something I felt I wished to express quite deeply.”

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Scottish national poet Jackie Kay talks about racism she endured as a child

May 22, 2020, 6:43 am

≫ Next: 'I wanted to be a part of Buenos Aires – and Borges was my guide'

≪ Previous: 'A joyful thing': the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years

Scotland’s makar recalls being taunted and beaten up by older boys as an eight-year-old and reflects on a much-changed country

One of Scotland’s most garlanded poets, Jackie Kay, has spoken out about the racist bullying she experienced as a child in the 1970s.

Kay, who is Scotland’s makar, or national poet, said that while growing up in Scotland, she “got beaten up quite a lot”. As an eight-year-old, she said, older boys would wait for her after school, “fill bubblegum wrappers with mud and get me down and shove them into my mouth and say, ‘That’s what you should eat, because you’re from a mud hut,’ and then I’d get beaten up.”

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'I wanted to be a part of Buenos Aires – and Borges was my guide'

May 23, 2020, 11:00 pm

≫ Next: Sex, lies and despair: unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love

≪ Previous: Scottish national poet Jackie Kay talks about racism she endured as a child

During the decade our writer lived in BA, he got to grips with its streets through the verse of Jorge Luis Borges – and is now revisiting the city via his poetry

Lockdown has made me nostalgic – not about travelling so much as about places. It’s no surprise the focus of some of my fondest remembering has been the world capital of looking back: Buenos Aires. The reasons behind this are many and complex. Porteños – BA residents – are famously given to looking far away, to the Spain or Italy of their ancestors, and to romanticising the brief belle époque of the early 20th century, when Argentina was rich and promising. Tango is laced with longing for the missed and elusive.

Borges was a serious flâneur, making epic wanderings like a modern psychogeographer

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Sex, lies and despair: unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love

May 24, 2020, 1:26 am

≫ Next: Poem of the week: Godhuli Time by Srinivas Rayaprol

≪ Previous: 'I wanted to be a part of Buenos Aires – and Borges was my guide'

A cache of 2,400 letters between the poet and his long-time lover and muse, Monica Jones, charts an explosive and flawed romance

“He lied to me, the bugger, but I loved him.” So Monica Jones described the revered poet Philip Larkin – a pithy but affectionate account of a lover who was serially unfaithful, but whose “utterly undistinguished little house” in Hull she turned into a shrine after his death.

Previously unpublished letters, however, reveal the full extent of her fury, fears and frustrations over a painful four-decade-long partnership with the man who wrote some of the most cherished verse in the English language.

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Poem of the week: Godhuli Time by Srinivas Rayaprol

May 25, 2020, 4:20 am

≫ Next: WeRNotVirus: plays to highlight Covid-19 racism against Asians

≪ Previous: Sex, lies and despair: unseen letters reveal Larkin's tortured love

An anglophone Indian poet, mentored by William Carlos Williams in the US, considers an Indian sunset in a voice that spans centuries and continents

Godhuli Time

It is the cow-dust hour
And smoke lies heavy over my head
As I walk across these earthen paths
And smells of burnt milk from inside
Mingle with those from the fields outside.

See the poet Dom Moraes for some interesting additional comments.

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