{"id":37925,"date":"2025-07-04T11:24:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-04T11:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/37925\/"},"modified":"2025-07-04T11:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T11:24:11","slug":"the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/37925\/","title":{"rendered":"The best recent poetry \u2013 review roundup | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mouth<\/a> by Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus, \u00a312.99<\/strong>)
<\/strong>We open with Mouthed, a hideous image of forced speech in which a\u00a0tongue is bitten out, a\u00a0head hacked off. The stakes for language here \u2013 who is allowed to bear\u00a0witness, and who is\u00a0not \u2013 are high. The book\u2019s opening section also includes scenes of near drowning, parental bullying, breakages, loss and childish torturing of animals. Only gradually do we realise we\u2019re being prepared for\u00a0the second section, Palace, in which Antigone mourns the death of her brother; as\u00a0the poet mourns the\u00a0brother who is her book\u2019s dedicatee. This vivid collection forces us to witness the violence inherent in grief. Mourning may be socially inconvenient; Mouth opens up some of\u00a0the space it needs. But by the end of the book, set at Cley nature reserve, bereavement has been neither resolved nor made tenable.<\/p>\n

The Anchorage<\/a> by Bernard O\u2019Donoghue (Faber, \u00a312.99)<\/strong>
These masterly portraits\u00a0of rural Irish farming life, and of community life in Oxford, explore place, time and belonging; they are full\u00a0of human feeling, yet never sentimental. Walking the Land tells how the family farm was\u00a0sold off,\u00a0\u201cthat cold March of\u00a01962\u201d, and lovingly lists old field names that\u00a0mean nothing to\u00a0the\u00a0\u201cshrewd and thoughtful men\u201d lining\u00a0up to buy it. In the\u00a0title poem\u2019s study in\u00a0neighbourliness, \u201call\u00a0the farmers in the parish\u201d rally round to\u00a0replace a year\u2019s hay\u00a0harvest lost in a barn fire. Such interconnected kindness matters, O\u2019Donoghue shows us, yet cannot \u201crepair the loss\u201d of the chained dog burned along with the barn. A collection valedictory in tone and\u00a0full of dedications, homages and memories\u00a0reminds us that, after the craic is over, we will all be \u201cfree\u00a0to pack up and make for\u00a0home\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Guaracara<\/p>\n

Guaracara<\/a><\/strong> by<\/strong> Fawzia Muradali Kane<\/strong> (Carcanet, \u00a312.99)<\/strong>
Kane is also an architect,\u00a0so it\u2019s no surprise that place and its meanings are central to her new collection. Guaracara is named for\u00a0the river in south Trinidad where her title\u00a0sequence of prose poems is set. These compelling snapshots from a rural childhood spent between that \u201ciridescent, slow moving\u201d polluted river, a railway, and a shanty town known as The Line, show us the strangeness of living under quarantine in a different epidemic: the polio that \u201cclosed the islands down in 1971 and \u201972\u201d. A\u00a0dreamlike sense of normality suspended, as well as of childhood\u2019s intrinsic strangeness, pervades the collection. A feeling of nightmare is used to fierce political effect in the book\u2019s central sequence, Let Us Mourn the Death of King Sugar, which addresses plantation history in the author\u2019s native Trini Creole.<\/p>\n

\"Bunting\u2019s<\/p>\n

Bunting\u2019s Honey<\/a> by Moya Cannon (Carcanet, \u00a311.99)<\/strong>
Cannon is an artist of delicacy and detail. Her seventh collection returns to Galway, where she\u2019s spent much of her adult life. It\u2019s a landscape of intimate knowledge: a \u201cJuly meadow \u2026 the blurry, summery sway of it\u201d in Monet in \u00c1rann, or hail showers \u201cstriding\u201d across the horizon of a January dawn. But this isn\u2019t sentimental nostalgia. Alongside glimpses of France, Italy and China, Cannon shows how the figures in her home landscape are shaped by violence, poverty and suffering; and grieves for her own family history. Illegitimacy and hiring fairs, starvation and emigration, workhouses and \u201cthe three girls in my year \/ who didn\u2019t return to school\u201d: she reminds us that, even among the \u201csilver-rimmed\u201d lochs and holy mountains, human suffering is the real story.<\/p>\n

\"Old<\/p>\n

Old World<\/a><\/strong> by<\/strong> Robert Crawford (Jonathan Cape, \u00a313)<\/strong>
Crawford\u2019s first collection in seven years\u00a0is a gallimaufry of\u00a0literary games and allusions; it is also ecological poetry of great intelligence and sensitivity. Both are projects to wrench open\u00a0our thinking about the climate crisis. Old World Emblems plays with font, turning classical archetypes \u2013 Sisyphus, Prometheus \u2013 literally inside out. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land structures The West Land, a lament for climate change. The medieval proverb that \u201cmeasure is treasure\u201d introduces an extinction reckoning; the title sequence\u2019s 66 haiku count down the planet\u2019s path to ecological destruction along with\u00a0the 66 years of\u00a0the\u00a0poet\u2019s\u00a0life. Conspicuous among fresh and airy haiku, a prose hybrid Essaythalamium, addressed to a young couple, concludes that \u201clife\u2019s one lasting meaning\u201d is love. Conventional religion may be an \u201cObsolete Broken Angel\u201d, but the crucifix in the Anglo-Saxon Dream of the Rood can be reread as a living tree. Life, and poetry, do go on.<\/p>\n

Joy Is My Middle Name<\/a> by Sasha Debevec-McKenney (Fitzcarraldo, \u00a312.99)<\/strong>
Among the first collections to be published by Fitzcarraldo, this debut\u00a0fits the\u00a0publisher\u2019s often modernist and experimental house style in ways that feel refreshing for UK poetry. Titles such as THE STARS OF THE FAST & FURIOUS FRANCHISE HAVE A CLAUSE IN THEIR CONTRACTS THAT SAYS THEY CAN NEVER LOSE A FIGHT introduce poems that are themselves fast and furious. These are smash-and-grab raids on a North American life of creative writing programmes and \u201cpeople \u2026 at the farmers\u2019 market being very specific \/ about their mushroom selection\u201d; of\u00a0cold chicken wings for breakfast and statues to racist presidents. Sexy and exciting, they read like riffs and mug like rants: but, as this brainy poet grapples middle-class mores to the ground, they can also be\u00a0extremely funny.<\/p>\n

Fiona Sampson\u2019s Becoming George: The Self-Invention of a Novelist will be published by Doubleday in February 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mouth by Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus, \u00a312.99)We open with Mouthed, a hideous image of forced speech in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":37926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-37925","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114794716472664905","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}