The Slain Birds by Michael Longley; The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón; Faust by Sandeep Parmar; Radical Normalisation by Celia Sorhaindo
The Slain Birds by Michael Longley (Jonathan Cape, £12)
Birds are some of poetry’s most intimate and mysterious companions: think of the owl of Athena in The Odyssey, the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Ted Hughes’s philosophical crows. The Slain Birds opens with a tawny owl killed by a motorist, later found by Longley’s granddaughters, who make “sketches in charcoal” and hug the feathers. Using ornithology as a guide, Longley’s exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat, while longing for a future for the next generation. Longley’s Midas touch never turns flora and fauna into gold, but makes foraged memories shimmer. His occasional poems capture transient places, people and events, but also a “soul-space” or “a state of mind”, as when he calls up “Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry, / The Owenadornaun’s five syllables”. Many syllables are devoted to birds in the book – the blackbird, cuckoo, flycatcher, eagle, godwit, house martin, nightingale, quail, raven, snipe and wren, to name just a few. This is counterbalanced by poignant homages to Homer, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Schubert, Mussorgsky and the great ornithologist David Cabot. The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley’s prolific repertoire, as the poet observes that “Silence that has lasted a thousand years / Is poetry of a kind”.
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón (Corsair, £12.99)
Like Longley, the US poet laureate Ada Limón is committed “to call things as they are”, believing in poetry’s resuscitative power when the name of a bird or tree is summoned. By far Limón’s most self- and world-examining book, The Hurting Kind captures the hidden, marginal forces of kindness and suffering around us. Whether it’s a groundhog stealing garden tomatoes, a belted kingfisher perching “on a transmission wire” or the fig buttercup invading the porch, Limón’s poems put non-human subjects centre stage without rendering the humans irrelevant. Instead, we’re asked “To be made whole / by being not a witness, / but witnessed”. This is not Keats’s negative capability but a poetry of full participation, of “searching for proof”. The effect is a set of astoundingly moving poems in which the self becomes an inclusive vehicle for bridging the hurting gaps between generations, ideas and living things. Limón has Elizabeth Bishop’s gift for difficult questions well disguised, and her lines ring truth not like a gong, but like the sound of wind flowing through leaves, as when the poet says “I’m wearing / my heart on my leaves” and asks “Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?” If you only read one book this autumn, make it this one.