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The best recent poetry – review roundup

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Reckless Paper Birds by John McCullough; Edge by Katrina Porteous; The Equilibrium Line by David Wilson; A Man’s House Catches Fire by Tom Sastry

John McCullough has a reputation for crafting lyric poems of the everyday with a surreal twist. In Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), his third collection and shortlisted for the Costa prize for poetry, the familiar yet strange is rarely more than a stanza away. As if Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems jumped headlong into our 21st century, McCullough’s lines sing of Lady Gaga, Instagram and house music, “plastic cats that raise huge paws” in a city where “there are many ways / to guzzle the scenery”. “Please don’t touch me, my head falls off,” reads the sign around the neck of a huge Playmobil figure in one poem; McCullough’s eye may be drawn to all manner of cultural detritus, but he is often able to find emotion and significance. History’s peculiarities also surface: “Queer-Cole” takes its name from the antiquated term for counterfeit money, blurring historical object with contemporary hurt and prejudice.

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