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The best recent poetry – review roundup

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Poor by Caleb Femi; The Actual by Inua Ellams; Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty; and Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology edited by Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan

It’s rare for a book of poems to repeatedly leave you breathless when reading it. Such is the urgent brilliance of Caleb Femi’s Poor (Penguin, £9.99). A former young people’s laureate for London, his series of dispatches anatomising the south London estate he grew up on is a multilayered accounting of the lives of young black men. He avoids an “urge to exorcise” or brittle celebration; rather he is clear-eyed and cool-headed, which makes observations like those in “Concrete (I)” all the more devastating: “I have nothing to offer you / but my only pair of Air Max 90s. / In principle, they are my autopsy laid out / in rubber and threading.” Femi’s language is restlessly inventive, unerring in uncovering images that lodge in your memory. His use of concrete as a recurring motif is brutally graceful, encapsulating this startlingly beautiful book, a landmark debut for British poetry.

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