The best recent poetry – review roundup
Self-Portrait As Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant; A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian; Artifice by Lavinia Singer; Master of Distances by Jordi Doce; Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Self-Portrait As Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant (Carcanet, £12.99)
This indispensable collection explores Shakespeare’s pernicious archetype, observing how “the Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body”. Yet Allen-Paisant makes the historical impasse an occasion for deep, generous interrogation of masculinity, and a linked elevation of the maternal that is at the heart of so many Caribbean and other families: “I’ve been leaning in- / to my mother tongue.” This book’s mother tongue belongs to “Mama”, a grandmother who raised the narrator. “Daddy”, meanwhile, remains a longed-for absence, “Un-Dad”. In this context of father-hunger, the “African soldier” who became the Moor of Venice at least stands for presence. Enriched by historical research, Self-Portrait As Othello celebrates representation, understanding and speech as acts of glorious resistance.
A Tower Built Downwards by Yang Lian, translated by Brian Holton (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
In exile from China since 1989’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Yang Lian is a writer of world significance; his admirers include Ai Weiwei, who designed the cover of his latest book. Its title evokes the exile’s backwards struggle to construct belonging. It also summarises Yang’s profound, distinctive verse, which clothes ideas and feelings with details from the lived world. Brilliantly translated by Brian Holton, this substantial collection revisits the poet’s personal China, particularly honouring his late father. It also captures the strangeness of pandemic: “Who does a poem cry for help to?” It’s a masterpiece speaking to us out of “the gale of history”.
Artifice by Lavinia Singer (Prototype, £12)
The closing section of Singer’s debut collection is titled Mystic Art. The phrase could serve as an ars poetica for this sensitive writing, often concerned with transcendence but managing at the same time a light playfulness: an “inkwell lark”. A lexicon of medieval imagery segues into myth and religion, from The Matchmaker’s Daughter, through the “brazen celebrity / hot sugar” of Waxworks, to the lovely folk shamanism of the concluding Blessing, which wishes us “hair of candlelight […] two ankle prisms / in a dish of feathers / songbirds stringing / from the armpits / scales and thorns / speech of ladders”. Elsewhere, that incantatory note brings alive a search for family roots in Bratislava and a Californian road trip. But the “Mystic Art” is, after all, ecology, and Singer shows us that the millennial response to climate emergency can include joy and meaning-making.
Master of Distances by Jordi Doce, translated by Terence Dooley (Shearsman, £12.95)
These short prose poems can be read individually, like aphorisms; and sequentially, as a record of the terrors and despair of accompanying someone through life-threatening illness. In a brilliant metaphor for the rigours of chemo, “the thread meant to lead you out of the labyrinth is a wire and its barbs prick your hands till they bleed and the exit opens onto another exit”. This necessary collection never slips into misery memoir. Instead, everything has been transformed in the shared language of dream: “At the back of the eye lives fear. At the back of the eye, the screen that spools and unspools dreams. The gleam of acetate, pale snow.”
Customs by Solmaz Sharif (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
The much garlanded Iranian-American poet was born in Istanbul in 1983. Customs is her second collection, and in it she makes use of fashionable ellipses to create a poetics of understatement. While everyday intimacies resemble “a little city, where / I’m most grateful to be alive”, the only words on the following page, placed amid three pairs of closed square brackets, are “Of / is such a little city.” This 22-page poem, Without Which, then moves to an encounter with a homeless man, “thin as a second hand” – a sympathetic pun concerning his hand-me-down clothes – before ending in a black page. Other less stylised pieces suggest generational trauma: An Otherwise revisits Sharif’s mother’s experience of the Iranian revolution. But, as Patronage observes, in the US, “poets coo. // And beg to be placed in a large room.” This collection, while shaking an elegant fist at “the wide hallways / of a great endowment”, is a useful dispatch from within such rooms.
