The best recent poetry – review roundup

A Blood Condition by Kayo Chingonyi; New Selected Poems by Frederick Seidel; Notes on the Sonnets by Luke Kennard; A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi; and Crossing Lines: An Anthology of Immigrant Poetry edited by Aaron Kent

Kayo Chingonyi’s second collection, A Blood Condition(Chatto, £10), takes its title from an unnamed illness that claimed the lives of his parents when he was a young adult. A deep thread of loss runs through these poems, and an attempt to reintegrate a past that spans Zambia, Newcastle and London. In “Hyem”, we learn of the young poet’s Geordie speech being interpreted as “demotic Bemba” in Zambia. “Postcard from the Sholebrokes” addresses another Newcastle poet, Tony Harrison, and “The last night of my 20s” is an affecting elegy for the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden. “Origin Myth” is a skilful series of seven linked sonnets on the legacies of illness and bereavement; “Acquaintance with the night has its uses”, Chingonyi writes, echoing Robert Frost’s “I have been one acquainted with the night”. These fine poems weigh their sorrows carefully, reminding us how best we might “carry a well of myth / in the pit of our pith”.