The best recent poetry collections – review

The Caiplie Caves by Karen Solie; The Mother House, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin; A Portable Paradise by Roger Robinson; and Still Life by Ciaran Carson

As someone who passes a Pictish symbol stone with an Ogham inscription to the obscure St Ethernan every time I go to Tesco, I might constitute the natural audience for a book-length sequence on that seventh-century Irish saint’s adventures in north-eastern Scotland. Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, Karen Solie’s TS Eliot prize-shortlisted The Caiplie Caves (Picador, £10.99) is one of the more unusual poetry collections of recent years. It is many things at once: a vision of insular Celtic Christianity in its early medieval heyday; a juxtaposition of this with a more elliptic modern narrative; and a meditation on literary form, and how the modernist long poem might look through a contemporary lens. Was Ethernan attracted by self-abnegation or a very unholy chance to show off (“I can’t be sure now there was ever humility in it / burning the self as though it were a city”)? The same might be asked of Solie herself. Whatever the answer, this is a wilfully strange and unforgettable performance.