Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire; Vinegar Hill by Colm Tóibín; Unexhausted Time by Emily Berry; Some Integrity by Padraig Regan
Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire (Chatto, £12.99)
Shire’s first full-length collection builds on her much admired pamphlets Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth and Her Blue Body. Intergenerational trauma arising from the legacy of war, colonialism and the ongoing refugee crisis are addressed with a painful and urgent clarity. In her notable poem “Home”, Shire writes, “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only / run for the border when you see the whole city running as well. / The boy you went to school with, who kissed you dizzy behind the / old tin factory, is holding a gun bigger than his body.” The need to reclaim ownership over one’s body is another key theme, especially in the wake of sexual trauma. In “Backwards”, a specular poem in which the latter half mirrors the first, Shire invokes the creative powers of the writer to transform one’s past: “Give them stumps for hands if even once they touched us without consent, / I can write the poem and make it disappear.” Vital, moving and courageous, this is a debut not to be missed.
Vinegar Hill by Colm Tóibín (Carcanet, £12.99)
Tóibín’s debut collection consists of lyric and narrative poems that traverse multiple physical locales and emotional landscapes, from Enniscorthy to Budapest to Los Angeles. A renowned novelist, Tóibín brings his keen eye for vivid narrative detail. In a candid poem about his visit to the White House on Saint Patrick’s Day in 2010, he writes: “We had expected to learn something in that house about power / And politics. Instead, we witnessed what it is like / To wear your welcome out. It does seem tempting, even still, / To imagine the line of waiters as a metaphor … / For soft power […] how to take a firm stance / On foreigners.” There is a lingering melancholyin Tóibín’s work, particularly in his sparse reflections on ageing and death: “In the book that points the way, / I found words and signs that served only / To mystify me further. It is not easy / For anyone being in the world”. Much of Vinegar Hill offers the pleasure of a slow, meandering walk, as if the reader and poet have companionably “decid[ed] to take / The slow way home”.