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The best recent poetry – review roundup
indiom by Daljit Nagra; The Lights by Ben Lerner; Isdal by Susannah Dickey; The Ferguson Report by Nicole Sealy; Let the Light Pour In by Lemn Sissay; For the Unnamed by Fred D’Aguiar
indiom by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)
After the solemnity of 2017’s British Museum, Nagra’s latest work is a mock epic set in a poetry workshop being filmed for a documentary. It foregrounds a discussion of how writers from migrant backgrounds might – or might not – be read and accepted, and how they position themselves in relation to standard English, the canon and knowing “thy Blighty”. This sounds forbiddingly academic, but indiom is a playfully giddy highwire act of sharp cultural and political observation, delivered with Nagra’s trademark linguistic exuberance: “Let’s not be scotched / from forking our fringe voice – it’s a migrant prerogative.”
The Lights by Ben Lerner (Granta, £12.99)
Lerner’s fourth collection is a series of dispatches from the “polycrisis”, which sees him searching for insight in a time of feeling overloaded: “The steady stream of isolated facts we call information distracts us from a basic fact whose shape we carry.” The dense, ruminative prose poems are balanced by shorter lyrics that have a tense, brittle quality. The overall effect is one of a glitchy sincerity, where abstraction and dislocation are powerful: “but why dismiss / what misapprehension can establish, our own / illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?”
Isdal by Susannah Dickey (Picador, £10.99)
Using the real-life case of an unidentified woman’s body found in Norway as a jumping off point, this brilliantly realised first collection by the novelist Susannah Dickey is a multilayered investigation into the ethics of the true crime genre. Sandwiching a philosophical discussion about representations of female death are rhyming couplets that nail the cliches of investigative podcasts, and a haunting imagining of the life of the girl who found the body. The inevitable trauma, it’s suggested, is deeper and wider than we recognise: “Grubby hands press a soft consciousness / to the wall. Elsewhere, shame covers iniquity like a pink sky.”
The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey (Bloodaxe, £12.99)
Sealey takes the US justice department’s investigation into the titular city’s police department after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown by one of its officers, then erases most of its words to reveal the underlying violence. Individual letters are picked out to form fragments, ratcheting up the tension as the eye moves down the page: “use-of-force. Force / of habit. Of nature. Force / feed. Force down. Force / his hand. Force in line”. From the strangulated legalese emerges a bleak, shocking beauty: “the soft music / from passing cars shouting / down the soft music of their dying”.
Let the Light Pour In by Lemn Sissay(Canongate, £12.99)
In this selection of the morning quatrains Sissay has been sending into the world via social media for the past 10 years, there is a heavy recurrence of imagery featuring the sun, moon, night and light, so that they almost become characters: “Moon in a wheelbarrow / Stars in a skip / Dawn holds the handles / Sun gets a grip”. While some feel throwaway, the best have an unforced charm: “There’s much I’ve done / There’s much to do / But I’m undone / When it comes to you.”
For the Unnamed by Fred D’Aguiar (Carcanet, £14.99)
“For the Unnamed Black Jockey Who Rode the Winning Steed in the Race Between Pico’s Sarco and Sepulveda’s Black Swan in Los Angeles in 1852” was the original title of this retelling of one of the most famous horse races in American history. D’Aguiar’s rhymes give the dialogues between Black Swan and the jockey an irresistible energy as freed slave and horse find common ground: “I, meaning we, train in the dark so no one / sees our black skin trembling with effort”. It’s a glorious gallop of a book.
