The best recent poetry – review roundup

The Resurrectionists by John Challis; Mother Muse by Lorna Goodison; Away from Me by Caleb Klaces; Rotten Days in Late Summer by Ralf Webb; and Poetry & Covid-19, edited by Anthony Caleshu and Rory Waterman

The past may be a foreign country, but things aren’t always so different there. In his debut collection, The Resurrectionists (Bloodaxe, £10.99), John Challis reminds us how both personal and collective histories remain a part of our present. Whether describing “used / and wasted love” stored in surreal depots, or a coal power station which is “always there, the church no one visits”, this is poetry as archaeology, though with a lyric alchemy that can conjure “a heap / of gangrenous bodies” at a plague-pit excavation in modern London. Challis commemorates the lives of working London people – butchers in Smithfield market, a cabbie father, “barrow boys and cockle pickers” – in poems that reflect on class politics while generally avoiding nostalgia. “I’ve been writing elegies for the undead”, confesses one speaker. The Resurrectionists is alive to both the individual moment and the long perspective.