Refractive Africa by Will Alexander; The Vulture by Gerard Woodward; Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke; Litanies by Naush Sabah; and Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar
Refractive Africa by Will Alexander (Granta, £10.99)
This visionary act of “transpersonal witness” to a continent is an Afromodernist epic in the tradition of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. It is first of all an act of repossession, as in the opening section’s dialogue with Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola and closing homage to the Madagascan Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, often considered Africa’s first modern poet. At the heart of the book is a 50-page poem, The Congo, on that country as a site of colonial pillage, “vertiginous with derangement”. An incantation against “Eurocentric stultification”, Refractive Africa embraces an aesthetic of sprawl and overreach, summoning free-flowing visions of grandeur and desolation. Alexander, an American, is the author of more than 30 books, and his introduction to a British readership is overdue.
The Vulture by Gerard Woodward (Picador, £10.99)
We begin with the discovery of a dead vulture at the foot of a cliff; slicing open its belly reveals “nothing in there / but the usual unspeakable things”. Any expectations of dark secrets laid bare in the poems that follow are tempered by a mood of ubiquitous quirkiness. Describing a piano stool, Woodward writes of its “black wood, as though the piano had calved”, a comparison that could be on day release from Craig Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home. He prefers his imagery poised and metaphysical: “scholarly, they held / seminars, conferences”, he says of some frogs. More memorable are the narratives of buildings and family histories in the book’s second half, such as Chinoiserie and Paraffin. These poems are at their best when they “come up against something solid”.