Howdie-Skelp by Paul Muldoon; Oak by Katharine Towers; Amnion by Stephanie Sy-Quia; New and Selected Poems by Ian Duhig
Howdie-Skelp by Paul Muldoon (Faber, £14.99)
Very few poets, living or otherwise, can combine high-speed wit, tongue-twisting alliteration and dizzying rhyme with the kind of insight that makes us pause, laugh, remember; feel envious, out of breath, punch-drunk. In Howdie-Skelp, Paul Muldoon summons the ghosts of TS Eliot and Dante to tell stories about our splintered realities, where the wasteland is everywhere and nowhere and Virgil is an immigrant waiter offering overpriced steak tartare. With cheeky poignancy and almost biblical satirical force, Muldoon captures the arrhythmia of our times, touching on voter suppression in the US, the killers of Jamal Khashoggi, the hopelessness of the two-party political system, and arguments about a united Ireland. With their elongated lines and expansive forms, often cast in sequences or variations, the poems feed on memories triggered by the news, TV binge-watching, ruins, damsons, or Robert Frost’s apples. They also flirt outrageously with paintings, translating the perverse and macabre into luminous commentaries on our desires and taboos. The book ends with 15 mutating sonnets about the rich absurdity of our pandemic lives and a new state of existential confusion.
Oak by Katharine Towers(Picador, £10.99)
Andrew Marvell, the Renaissance poet of green thoughts and green shades, would have liked Katharine Towers’ third collection. Perhaps John Keats and John Clare would too, though Keats might have been wary of the book’s structural predictability and Clare of its narrative ambition. Nevertheless, Many of us will find delight in Towers’ playful concoction, paying homage to love songs, ballads, hymns, gossip, nonsense and children’s verse, among other lyric forms. Questions of poetic legacy and arboreal heritage run deep in Oak. Echoing Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, the book’s sections tell the life story of an oak – the infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, old man – and are narrated like fables with a lyrical friskiness that is eye-catching, though occasionally hackneyed. Mostly unpunctuated, the poems are heavily invested in metaphor and simile (“like” being a populous word). Towers has a natural gift for playing out the tension between personifying and de-personifying nature. Her unabashedly descriptive poems evoke the private and public life of the oak, speaking with “a quirk of the tongue / which can’t help curling”.