New poetry by Alicia Byrne Keane, David Wheatley, Rachel Mann and Ishion Hutchinson

Alicia Byrne Keane’s debut, Pretend Cartoon Strength (Broken Sleep Books, £8.99), brings us a poet whose default mode is to look at things “slant”. These poems, concerned with interiors, domestic spaces, and close-up portraits of wildness, are painterly in their detail, gently probing the nature of our perception. Wildflowers, seen close up, are “a bruise/ through the dark of meadow”, “periwinkle circles under eyes”, “the tide captured in/ a bowl”, in Wildflowers (I’m Not Sure). There’s a restless, shifting perspective here that renders the familiar strange, as in the opening poem, Resolving, which examines a woodland table: “The sun has concentrated in your flat weight/ rust-bleached, and I am only now looking at you/ properly, full of silent corners that invite rupture.”

In these poems, buildings mark the passing of time, and are imbued with the kind of magnetic power to which Byrne Keane’s attention is minutely attuned. McAllister’s Garage recalls Bishop’s totemic evocation of place, the minutiae of the specific opening out into broader meditations within tightly honed forms:

“ ... McAllister’s Garage is somewhere I have never

been inside, I have only seen the dim objects on

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display at a remove, I have only measured

lateness by the sip of minutes at this

traffic light ... ”

The collection’s later poems explore the domestic in the very different light of lockdown, and it’s fascinating to see how these tensions impact on Byrne Keane’s measured tone. A sense of dread creeps into observations of the world outside the window in poems such as Sticky terms, where the nature of our observation becomes freighted with unwelcome meaning:

“I look at the solstice kept at bay by floodlights

& how the branches hold the sky’s rime-silver edge

in a fuzz of becoming,

& am jealous of the trees

& am embarrassed for the trees”

The world as seen through the lens of Byrne Keane’s poems is bracingly strange, and always surprising.

David Wheatley’s use of the ballad in several poems is masterful, revivifying a muscular form

David Wheatley’s sixth collection, Child Ballad (Carcanet, £12.99), builds on themes explored in his earlier collections; a psychogeographic approach to landscape and history, a keen feeling for form, and a sense of how language connects us. Into this mix, Child Ballad introduces parenthood and its epiphanies. Wheatley is a peripatetic poet, his imagination roving across the Scottish highlands of his current home, and farther afield, across the Irish Sea to the country of his birth.

Many of his poems are a dialogue between these versions of self, set against historical backdrops. The opening lines of the collection – “If I never go home it is because/ the tides, I have noticed, flow in one direction/ only” (The Companions of Colmcille) – could reflect the experience of any contemporary migrant, but here recall Irish missionaries’ efforts to Christianise Scotland. These historical poems refuse to stay rooted in the misty past, with poems of ecological grief demonstrating the uncomfortable links between history and present-day industry:

“…I would number the oil-fields named for saints

and seabirds: Ninian, Columba, Shearwater,

Auk. Sea-spray and thunder; kittiwake’s egg

of a scarred moon.”

(Adomnán’s Sermon to the Oil Rigs)

Wheatley’s use of the ballad in several poems is masterful, revivifying a muscular form. Poems of parenthood are often written in a minor key, yet in the collection’s title poem there’s an exuberance befitting a child’s announcement of its presence in the world:

“Nine months I sailed within my mother, now

head up, now down, a fitful questing prow

in search of wider seas. Now you are the tide

I plough, wide world; grant my sails godspeed.”

Child Ballad’s themes come together even as they fragment in the long final poem, A Curious Herbal, which deserves more attention than I have space to give it here. A microscopic look at the flora of Scotland, these meditations branch out into disquisitions on perception, language, connection and translation; the collection’s themes in microcosm: “one language/ darkening into/ another’s gleam.”

Rachel Mann’s poems are always emotionally accessible, operating on a level of insight and care that might restore a person’s faith in spirituality

In Eleanor Among the Saints (Carcanet, £11.99), we find Rachel Mann similarly preoccupied with language’s transformational potential. In a series of poems inspired by the medieval trans woman, sex-worker and seamstress Eleanor Rykener, Mann demonstrates poetry’s ability to find freedom in a world that insists on set binaries. These are poems of craft and making, and Mann, herself a priest, focuses in on acts of self-fashioning in poems such as Embroidering a Priest and Eleanor, in the Beginning:

“Thing of nightmare, all agency, free finally of what

You’d make me; sew me into escape, O

God of thread, shoddy, scrap – You know, you know

Text is textile texture textus ...”

For all their linguistic fireworks and probing of meaning, these poems are always emotionally accessible, operating on a level of insight and care that might restore a person’s faith in spirituality. Particularly adept at the glorious unravelling that love can render on a body and a spirit, these poems abound with witty asides (“Heaven’s a bore”) and devastating last lines, such as “…Child’s first trembling question: Why do adults call fear ‘love’?” in Eleanor Constructs a Father.

These poems of remade lives and identities don’t shy away from the difficulties facing the trans community, including the constant threat of violence, and poems such as Eleanor as a Sixteen Year Old Murdered Trans Girl, What Is Known is a clipped, fragile, bruising read – defensive in the manner of someone being forced to justify their very existence: “I did not know a body could be killed multiple times/I think this might be one such attempt”.

There is physical danger and death here, but also an exploration of the death of the self that makes way for new possibilities, new awareness, and that recognises the tenderness inherent in a burning away of the old:

“Here’s

The thing: One can kill for love –

I believe that, so do you, I think we all do,

Why else legislate against it?

Why else sharpen a knife? Oh, Love, sweet love.”

(Deleted Lines)

Ishion Hutchinson’s skill lies in the tethering of the larger terrifying vision of trench warfare to the quotidian familiar

Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions (Faber, £12.99) is a book-length palimpsest, where layers of history slip across each other like skeins of silk, occasionally coalescing to create images larger than the sum of their parts. Written in clipped but tuneful lyric fragments, this book collides a narrative of first World War West Indian soldiers in the Middle East with the boyhood of Godspeed, a schoolboy in Jamaica in the 1990s. The strands of these stories are not always easy to untangle, but that seems to be the very point of Hutchinson’s project; history informs our movements, always, whether we see its guiding hands or not. And so, while Godspeed stands by his grandmother’s bed, or boxes his cousin, or learns Shakespeare, battalions are marching through the poems, their stations marked in capital letters:

“At Happy Grove Godspeed was instructed to penetrate

that sweet swan of AVON. Titters. But AVON. Where

was AVON? Must be over SHOTOVER or NONSUCH or

NORWICH or one of the easterly ridges of PORTLAND

galvanised with rusty shanties glinting off the bankrupt

Commonwealth sea.”

(VI)

Hutchinson moves seamlessly from the detail of rural Jamaican life to broader apocalyptic visions conjuring the horrors of trench warfare. His skill lies in the tethering of that larger terrifying vision to the quotidian familiar; in sifting through the mud of war, we’re confronted with the unheimlich:

“Scabies mud. Mumps mud. Memra mud. Pneumonia mud.

Mene mene tekel upharsin mud. Civil war mud.

And darkness and worms will be their dwelling place mud.

Yaws mud. Gog mud. Magog mud. God mud.”

(from His Idylls at Happy Grove)

As the narrative builds and gathers pace, and Godspeed’s childhood is punctuated by bouts of illness, bullying and violence, the details of the war deaths build, delivered in a chillingly factual tone: “Embers under the yabba. 6322 Pte I McKenzie ‘C’ boy died/ pneumonia”, “No. 921 Etc. App. C. H. ‘B’ boy/ killed accidentally by grenade.” All the while, Godspeed struggles under the weight of the colonial trappings placed upon him: “He pinned a/ gashed poppy to his uniform shirt and it bled anew.” (LIII) Both a monument and an act of tearing down, this collection is a tremendous achievement.