The Asking: New & Selected Poems, Jane Hirshfield (Bloodaxe, price: £14.99)

Jane Hirshfield is undoubtedly one of our contemporary greats. Now, The Asking is her ‘new and selected’ – ‘selected’ being a compilation of past poems that only our very best poets find inside a publication of this name (‘collected’ is the next, and even greater accolade, of course). In this, Hirshfield demonstrates, page by page, why she is globally known and universally admired, including by this writer. Consider, for instance, just this one poem, very short and selected at random:

Late Prayer
Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby –
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

The Rumi-esque beauty of this piece is palpable and incredibly affecting, and there are over 300 other such pages / poems included in The Asking. The spiritual aspect of Hirshfield’s work is what stands out for me, with ‘prayers’, ‘blessings’, and meditations most common; the soul, and its doubt, desperation, loss, and then moving beyond these towards certainty and self-understanding, are key themes. The everyday – “Rain fell as a glass / breaks, / something suddenly everywhere at the same time” – and the infinite exist side by side, the one a mirror of, or portal to, the other; like “the skipping rope’s two ends” they are connected, and in these sparse yet deep, delicate yet weighty poems, we enjoy life’s jump, dance, and twist between them.

Fantasia, Nisha Ramayya (Granta, price: £12.99)

“If I am read brownly, heard brownly, weighed brownly, what am I?” asks Nisha Ramayya in this collection, Fantasia, which holds this as one of its interwoven themes, but expands out towards questions, answers, and – to me, it seemed – riddles or, like this question, koans, which can never hope to be resolved. Since sound is the main source material and physical sense that is explored in these poems, however, perhaps coming to neat conclusions was bound to be impossible; instead, there are strange, surrealist images which, like “a tottering column of sea urchins” dance and sway in and out of view, and a strong immersion into the sounds of language itself, constantly playing, shifting, and singing into fantastic melodies, musical refrains, and returns.

Close reading is therefore a must with Fantasia, so that you catch all of its many nuances, subtleties and complexities. Alternatively, as with any ‘fantasia’, you could just get lost in it, as if in a dreamscape of sorts, enjoying the aural quality of the poems, their startling, sometimes strange, imagery, their originality, and also their joyousness: because this is a poet who revels and delights in language, and Ramayya, if anything, is very much a word musician, even a magician who, like Mickey Mouse in the Disney animation of the same name, commands the inanimate – words, in this case – to come marvellously to life.

Compelling, endlessly creative, and captivatingly original, I leave you with just three words from the book’s final poem to tease you, and to incite you to read this one when you can:
snip!
snap!
snorum!

Strange Husbandry, Lorcán Black (Seren, price: £10.99)

The past and the present sink and slide into each other in this collection, which considers queer experiences in the present alongside tales from the mythic past: Salome, Aphrodite, Juno, Jupiter, and Io all appear here, for example, as well as real historical personages such as 17th-century farmer Giles Corey, who died during the Salem Witch Trials; Irish rebels executed by the British; and Greek mathematician Hypatia, who was murdered due to issues of gender. A painting by Rembrandt also provides inspiration, in the poem The Descent from the Cross, which features Mary Magdalene, Nicodemus, and other biblical personages, to offer an interesting and affecting meditation upon death and love.

Although the past informs poems, the present is palpable, too, as in some of the book’s opening poems, set in Portugal, London, and Ukraine, and offering up contemporary images of people who “starve & thirst & beg for mercy” or, alternatively, of “sunscreen, sea-washed days”, at both ends of our human experience. Of particular interest to me, again, considering my own recent book Bog Witch, is the poem Bog Man in a Museum, which sees the present – the writer – in conversation with the past – the Bog Man, who was very likely sacrificed and “Cut / straight through the heart”. Whilst this figure acts a mirror for societal chains and brutal ends, the book’s final poem is wonderfully positive, revelling in the freedom of the modern age in which, instead of sacrifice and religious ties, there is “smoke in the air / and Andrew Christian underwear on the floor”, and “pure wet love / with each other, our male form”.

Lucid and lively by turns, Strange Husbandry explores darkness but ends in light, lifting the reader to a “Next New Testament” that is, in general, jubilant and joyous.

Broadlands, Matt Howard (Bloodaxe, price: £12)

The reedbeds and marshes of the Norfolk Broads provide the place for Broadlands which often, to me, reads as if the writer is reporting right from the ground there, so alive and in-the-moment do the poems seem. A fat cuckoo chick being fed, mouth gaping, by its small, meadow pippit stepparent stares out from the front cover, a stark reminder that nature is all about nurture and, by nature, that nurturing may be ‘unnatural’ if one is to survive. “All the risk and need” of birds, insects, even spores, are brought gloriously to life, here, in a book which unites a naturalist’s eye with the imagination and inventiveness of a poet, creating an admixture of observed facts and fantastic, faceted ways of presenting these that is at once fluid and direct yet also entirely unique.

Instead of nature becoming an extension of us humans, in Broadlands it is more a mirror of the human condition, offering up its cycles of life and death, hunger and satiety, desire and loss, such as we experience, too. Howard cleverly shows all the creatures in this book – and, by extension, us too – as “off looting / each annexed margin for living space”, thus speaking voluminously about our grabbing natures, about capitalism itself, but in an indirect, nuanced way that allows the reader to render their own imaginative engagement with the images and ideas he supplies. This extra element pushes the book from very good to excellent, in my opinion, as it never talks down but, rather, assumes the reader has the capacity to ‘step up’. A highly recommended read, as a result, and a showcase for the power and profundity that nature poems can possess.