Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri (Jonathan Cape, £14.99)
The long-awaited debut collection from the former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London invites readers to consider the concept of diaspora. Mehri brings unflinching discursive skills to verse that melds criticism, autobiography and essay while still achieving a crisp sonic momentum characteristic of lyric poetry. The meanings of diaspora in this collection are as varied as the forms Mehri deploys: prose poems, found poems, poems using emojis and erasures. “Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.” “I don’t want to guard something I don’t own.” Mehri finds a new tone somewhere between Gwendolyn Brooks’s effortless musicality and Carolyn Forché’s noun-laced haunting intensity. Hers is a dazzling voice that refuses to speak from a podium, preferring to examine guilt, culture and personhood from within the “nightly decision” of community.
Wound Is the Origin of Wonder by Maya C Popa (Picador, £10.99)
The astounding poem Dear Life opens this meditative and purposefully heart-decelerating second collection. It foregrounds Popa’s pared-back style of earnest revelation and precise use of abstraction: “I have wanted all the world, its beauties / and its injuries; some days, / I think that is punishment enough.” Popa’s sensuous voice hymns everything from bees to religious iconography, and often spotlights other authors. “Begin again in darkness, life says sometimes” she writes of Milton and Galileo, who both lost their sight. In this collection, sight, grief and language “that only dreams the hunted thing” are foundational wounds. With an extraordinary poetic patience, Popa reminds us that a wound “is where the light enters us”.
The Recycling by Joey Connolly (Carcanet, £12.99)
In Connolly’s second collection, contemporary existential angst arises from and is sustained by ecological concerns, interpersonal breakups, and – most radically – linguistic power imbalances. The title poem has the feel of an ad-lib in action: “Strange noun full of verb, noun / bending to verb, strange / idea of repeating repetition”. Connolly concentrates this anxiety in a brilliantly crippling 24-page stream of epigraphs, quoting from figures such as Lucretius, Milton and Austen, Helen Oyeyemi and Nuar Alsadir. Epigraphs, individual words and poetic forms are recycled and therefore changed: “Do you seriously believe, / fourteen lines in, that there’s still a decision to be made?” This sonnet-conscious poem continues for eight more lines, before spiralling, as many of these poems do, into a flurry of questions. “Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I confused?” The Recycling is a powerful addition to the genre of ecopoetry, demonstrating that the upkeep of ecosystems begins with and is aided by the upkeep of language.
Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan (Faber, £10.99)
As it contains many poems about boxing, one would not expect restraint to be among the most moving features of Ryan’s debut collection. In fact, a persistent melancholic gentleness pervades throughout. His speakers feel more than they can say, and are often critical about what little has been said: “You won’t remember this – one evening, typically throwaway, / you said I couldn’t, strictly speaking, be a failed writer, never having written.” Boxing sequences read like myth; Ryan’s attention to the temporal in these poems (“Two years ago from tonight”, “twenty years, four months, and twenty-two days old”) demonstrates a sensibility attuned to the loss of vitality, the understanding that anyone’s time “in the ring” is limited. Crisis Actor is a lithe debut characterised by these two lines: “They think it’s just the power. / But it’s the accuracy of the power.”
