The best recent poetry – review roundup

Witch by Rebecca Tamás; Near Future by Suzannah Evans; O Positive by Joe Dunthorne; Discipline by Jane Yeh

Rebecca Tamás’s debut collection, Witch (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), has caused a stir, and it’s not hard to see why. Whereas some poets strive for a quiet lyricism, crafting what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion”, others face the world head-on, penning zippy verse that reflects the current moment. Opening with a “penis hex”,Witch is intent on reclaiming the sorcerer as a symbol of female empowerment, conjuring spells where “the smell of freedom is the smell of vomit”. Freewheeling and spirited, these poems tend to take the form of lengthy streams of consciousness, blurring statements, non sequiturs and disembodied confessions to unpick themes as various as logic and friendship. The formula risks exhaustion over 100 pages, but Tamás is frequently vivid and compelling: “at the trial they made a lot of claims about the witch / that she brought lightning / that she stole babies and ate them raw on battlefields / that she said war and it was war”.

Another collection with its gaze fixed on the zeitgeist is Suzannah Evans’s Near Future (Nine Arches, £9.99). Reflecting our age of anxiety and doom-mongering, it worries at “the five types of apocalypse: nuclear, contagious, climatic, superintelligent, religious”. But if titles such as “A Contingency Plan”, “Coastal Erosion” and “Letter into Eternity” make Near Future sound like a preachy eco-manual, it is rarely didactic. Evans’s style combines serious concerns with strange comedy, from a school play directed by “Mr Maxwell, millennial prophet and Head of Theatre Studies”, to “the call centre at the end of the world” where “lateness for shifts is not tolerated / although at this stage few of us / have homes to go to”. Influenced by science fiction as much as apocalyptic eco-poetics, these imaginative poems unpick distinctions between the human and the natural world, as fatbergs “dream of freedom” and robotic bees are revived “with a teaspoon of WD40”.