New poetry: Stephen Sexton on collections including a study of Muslim girlhood and an exploration of grief

Safia Elhillo’s Girls that Never Die (Bloomsbury, £7.99, is a fantastically imaginative, powerful and poignant exploration of Muslim girlhood. Its first poem, Final Weeks, 1990 is a kind of nativity: “Milky winter sun in Sagittarius. I should mention there was a husband, twenty-seven – / I can hardly imagine it, a boy that age, my father”. The poem Orpheus is a subtle and articulate take on myth and patriarchy: “I have no real use now for those Greek myths, their dead girls […] All I know about Eurydice/ is that she died”.

Beyond these introductory lyrics are poems scrutinising language, alert to its powers of censorship and control: “i know ninety-nine names / for my god & none for my [ ]” (Profanity). Throughout, Elhillo writes between erasure and presence; silence and speech, particularly concerned with obsessions of purity and violence: “Because I am their daughter my body is not mine./ I was raised like fruit, unpeeled & then peeled” (Pomegranate). Infibulation Study, in measured prose, considers the euphemisms, in English and Arabic, of genital mutilation.

This is a book of various moods and tones, of flourishes formal and stylistic: poems in distinct columns evoke ruptures and splits and borders between people, selves and nations. In Tony Soprano’s Tender Machismo, the poet discovers, surprisingly, in the mafioso and his company, something familiar: “I watch him cup a face in his great paw to kiss a cheek,/ exact manners of my first beloved men,/ sturdy & brokenhearted as cattle, my uncles”. Elegy, a striking poem, begins “see her: little cousin, little sister, sparrow-boned, alive./ i want to turn to firewood everything that hurts her./ i do not have the verbs for what i need for her”.

A superb book, certain to be one of the year’s standout collections.

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‘You’ll be in the front room/ at your computer,/surrounded by your family/ of anglepoise lamps’ is how the first poem begins, a devastating future continuous tense the reader knows will not be realised

Paul Stephenson’s Hard Drive (Carcanet, £12.99) is an extraordinary achievement of grief and loss. Following his partner’s sudden death, this substantial and generous book is testament to the multifarious effects of grief, its processes, passions and ambushes. Across this meticulously balanced book, we are given the life of the beloved as well as his death. “You’ll be in the front room/ at your computer,/surrounded by your family/ of anglepoise lamps” is how the first poem begins, a devastating future continuous tense the reader knows will not be realised. “I’ll be alive. You’ll be alive./ It’ll be like old times,” is how the poem ends. This kind of tragic wit, which suffuses the book, intensifies its emotional charge.

So often, we see the poet turning away from his subject, but allowing us to see what he’s turning from. This is the power of the work and the skill of the poet. For instance, The Description of the Building is composed of architectural details found online and observed. It does not, however, “mention how,/ when you’ve an appointment to see the body,/ you stare over at the building/ from inside the car, muttering That must be it”.

Interwoven with these often casually striking moments are poems of wordplay and etymology. Your Name excavates the many uses and histories of Tod (fixation on the name is a convention of elegy), and Condolences – which bristles at misspellings of Tod as Todd, is playfully stacked with words containing ‘dd’: “I’ll do my goddamndest / to look forbidding to the befuddled granddaddy/ doddering along”. The practical realities of death (A Prayer for Death Admin) alongside the profoundly personal give this book an impressive latitude. It’s rare for a work of elegy to achieve such capaciousness and to retain such power.

[ Poem of the Week: To a Dodder River Tree ]

Poems in The Silence (Carcanet, £12.99), the new collection from former National Poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, are fixated on the silences of the pandemic and the introspective, thoughtful silences of the poet at work. Here, silence is not in opposition to the poem or its utterances, but rather a condition in which language may be found. An eerie, ominous and elegant poem, Blood Moon, opens the collection: “We set the alarm for four, sleep curled/ against the ice-cold night as moon and world/ work their magnetism, oceans drawn/ and let go by the luminous old stone”.

What follows are poems in the mood of the lockdowns (The Year of the Dead) and in Virus wherein the virus itself might be read, metaphorically, as poetry itself: “You have to admire its beauty,/ its will to live, fizzing/ in a soup of chemicals,/ wanting nothing but a living host/ to practise symmetry/ and cell division.”

The Muse to the Poet after the Poet Becomes a Father, the muse laments the poet’s lack of interest, having been usurped by a son

It’s strange, these years since the start of the pandemic, to think of these silences Clarke captures so well: “There is time and silence/ to tell the names of the dying, the dead/ under empty skies unscarred/ by transatlantic planes”. Clarke is, of course, a poet of the natural world. As the collection develops, the world of the pandemic gives way to resonant poems of ecology, geology and childhood. A Box of Gloves, among several about the poet’s mother, is wonderfully attentive: “In a box, gloves, folded in pairs/ like hands in prayer, clean as if never worn,/ in cotton, silk, the softest leather”. There is a numinous quality to this book, a kind of spiritual attention which reveals, by silence and contemplation, the wondrous.

In his third collection, Swans We Cannot See (The Gallery Press, €12.95), Andrew Jamison gives us poems of parenthood and food, music and history. As its title suggests, the swan is an important symbol of beauty and industry: the tranquil creature with furious feet. So many of these poems are ars poetica – poems concerned with the art of making poetry. As such, Jamison is in a meta-textual mood. In its dramatic monologue, The Muse to the Poet after the Poet Becomes a Father, the muse laments the poet’s lack of interest, having been usurped by a son: “What about this morning sky I’ve brought,/ mottled and pink, the leaves of the copper beech/ I’ve scattered painstakingly over the lawn,/ the light of the moon […] Doesn’t that at least remind you of walking home/ by country roads at night in your teens?”

[ Poem of the Week: Winter Apples ]

Likewise, In Praise of Parmesan has cheesemakers who take a “special silver hammer” to “decipher if it’s ready,/ to gauge its age,/ adjudicate whether/ this one passes muster”. In Praise of Artisans imagines the craft of staircase making, a novel metaphor for the lyric poem: a device for ascent. Longer poems, JM Synge in Crossgar, 2022 and A Short History of the Potato, are witty but ambitious in their scale.

Poems for friends and family are particularly accomplished. To Angel, Islington is a moving tribute to Roddy Lumsden, poet and facilitator. Heaven as a Newsagents sees the afterlife so, “Mary Miscampbell/ selling Turkish Delight and Gold and Silver/ Benson and Hedges”. “My grandparents will be there,” he writes, “gossiping about who’s died, the endless weather”. On Earth as it is in Heaven, as they say. Full of craft, humour and delight, there is much below the surface in this thoughtful collection.