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The best recent poetry – review roundup
The Poems by Derek Mahon; Far District by Ishion Hutchinson; Stones by Kevin Young; and Like A Tree, Walking by Vahni Capildeo
The Poems by Derek Mahon (Gallery Press, €22.50)
With Derek Mahon’s death in October 2020, the world lost one of the great modern lyric poets. From Night-Crossing (1968) to Washing Up (2020), he fashioned an oeuvre of rare elegance, wit and visionary reach. “Even now there are places where a thought might grow”, begins his best known poem, A Disused Shed in Co Wexford, snatching its moment of triumph from the violent panorama of history. Mahon was a lifelong self-revisioner, and monumental though it is, this post-revisions volume will not be to everyone’s taste, with some key omissions making it a Collected rather than a Complete Poems. Still, the work endures, “rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new”.
Far District by Ishion Hutchinson (Faber, £9.99)
“There is nothing here, // no visible history”, the Jamaican poet Ishion Hutchinson reports in the titular poem. Even as he echoes James Anthony Froude, Hutchinson turns that Victorian traveller’s erasure of the West Indies to creative account. Landscapes are painted in a pseudo-anthropological style (“the sugar-headed children will wander / the field at night, lost to the scavenging / green, eating the ripe flux of the land”), the better to capture not just the thing in itself but the layered narratives of which history is made. The effortless sketches of New World Frescoes bear comparison with Derek Walcott, whose heir Hutchinson is in many ways becoming. In Autobiography of Snow he trails Caribbean forefather Claude McKay, “waiting for your coat to turn the corner, / licked by a lamp’s flame”. Like the butterflies of House on the Hill, these are poems that “beat their wings in [the] throat”.
Stones by Kevin Young (Cape, £12)
“Man is in love and loves what vanishes, / what more is there to say?” mused Yeats brokenheartedly. In Stones, American poet Kevin Young goes one step further: “I’m done being // in love with / what leaves”. Young has always favoured the short line, and in Stones combines brevity and sharp line breaks in poems that spurn the formal consolations of the Yeatsian high style. The theme is grief. Poems perform a stark self-subtraction towards silence and white space – “of us there is / always us” – and dance on the edge of a formal death wish (“Nothing can make, make me want / to stay / in this world”). Even when he titles a poem Balm, Young realises “the end // has no end”. Stones is a book of language at its limits, paring down the usual occasions of joy in the face of loss until only the gesture of the poem itself remains, frail, endangered, yet resilient.
Like a Tree, Walking by Vahni Capildeo (Carcanet, £11.99)
“I am / without those things they say a poem needs”, we read in Capildeo’s fourth collection since the Forward prize-winning Measures of Expatriation in 2016. Lack is a not infrequent starting point for the post-Covid poem, and in Walk #7, Capildeo embarks on an “imaginary stroll” on an “imaginary holiday” in France. Real or remembered, Capildeo’s travels are driven by “love of things invisible”, and a reaching out across time as well as space, as in the verse-essay Windrush Reflections. Erasure poems unearth ghostly presences beneath texts by Simone Weil and Julian of Norwich, and translations from Eugène Ionesco further flesh out an imagined France, where “the least little thing is a splendour”. “Just look how / I’ve lost form” frets the lovely sequence After an Unspeaking. The rich poems of Like a Tree, Walking suggest otherwise.
