Cain Named the Animal by Shane McCrae; Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong; Garden Physic by Sylvia Legris; Panic Response by John McCullough; Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing
Cain Named the Animal by Shane McCrae(Corsair, £10.99)
Curious about life in and after “the tribe of Eden”, American Shane McCrae’s eighth collection investigates the origin of time when “God first thought time itself / Was flawed but time was God’s first mirror”. McCrae’s poems possess a self-reflective quality without being burdened by history. As in Beckett and Whitman, repetition generates a self-searching, hypnotic music. His poetry moves freely within the restricted syllabic lines, constructing a wild, vivid dreamworld of a lush green garden, where an angry robot bird leads us down an Edenic rabbit hole. What sounds surreal in McCrae’s jazz-like poetry is actually human psychology, knowledge and violence, as when the poet asks “Where else do humans start” in the knowledge that “Cain named / The animal in Abel’s head”. In addition to McCrae’s sustained biblical investment, the book includes intimate poems about childhood and questioning reflections on masculinity and the unpredictable chain reactions of family life. It confirms McCrae as one of the most erudite and inventive poets of our time, throwing punches at the English language and its hierarchical traditions.
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong(Jonathan Cape, £14.99)
“How come the past tense is always longer?” Ocean Vuong asks, as he questions the nature of time when confronted by his mother’s death. Not since Emily Dickinson has poetry conveyed such an oceanic openness to the self’s quiet laceration and resilience. These new poems collect fragile private moments and glue them together, like Joseph Cornell’s collages made out of rescued materials. They are emotionally potent due to their inherent vulnerability. Bullet imagery cuts through the book, especially in Dear Rose, a time-bending elegy as big-hearted as Frank O’Hara’s: “the bullet / makes you real by making you less”. Vuong’s words hit us with debris that resemble our own memories of art, love, grief and survival. His mothering poems register the incompleteness of life, even as we find ourselves in a world where a single word, a quick turn of phrase or a short line make a difficult moment bearable. All the same, the violent process of fermentation they exhibit keeps poetry pungent, truth-seeking and unerasable.