The best recent poetry – review roundup

Learning to Sleep by John Burnside; A Year in the New Life by Jack Underwood; Lyonesse by Penelope Shuttle; The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser; and Ballad of a Happy Immigrant by Leo Boix

Learning to Sleep (Cape, £10), John Burnside’s first poetry collection since 2017, is a reckoning with the many sleep disorders (including severe insomnia and apnoea) that have afflicted him for a number of years. The absence of rest, and its physical and mental impacts, is made tangible. “Ode to Hypnos” begins: “Here is the angel of slumber, come from the woods / to press a bloody talon to the glass”, and that uneasy note infuses the book. Though Burnside may not wish to “harbour the dead”, ghosts roam through these poems, including the poet’s mother and Rimbaud, reluctantly appearing in a town in Lincolnshire. Burnside deftly provides some light within this gloaming: “and we, who believe / in nothing but superstition, / bring out the dead in our hearts / to be born again.”