Selected Poems, Lavinia Greenlaw (Faber, price: £12.99)

Many of these poems from Lavinia Greenlaw contain imagery, phrases, stories and ideas that seem, upon first reading, to be koan-like. As such, these expressions cannot necessarily be answered, but are, rather, explored, examined, played with and upon. The koans are many; sometimes they are in statement form – “When I left that house I took a key / to a door I never opened”; “So bored we made a film of our lives / and played ourselves” – sometimes they are a question, an observation, or a mulling upon a topic.

There are no neat answers or packaged-up resolutions, here, but, rather, an encompassing of opposites. One poem, Radium is about a young woman who paints illuminated numbers on clock faces but, because of that substance, ‘grows dull’: “The doctors gave up, removed half her jaw, / and blamed syphilis when her thigh bone snapped”.

Nothing in this book is easy, or easily tied off: there are ‘partial truths’, and even a bluebell wood, which many a poet would paint as simply lovely, is here described as “bright shallows overwhelming / a crowd of vertical tensions”. It’s stark, sharp, and unsettling as a result – as this book is. But also, it’s clever, brilliantly observed, and unusual in its outlook. A ‘selected’ that’s both daring and disturbing in equal measure, with some uplifting moments, too, making for a pretty amazing read as a result.

Girls That Never Die, Safia Elhillo (Bloomsbury Poetry, price: £8.99/£7.99 Ebook)

There are a lot of girls in Girls That Never Die; some of them may be author Safia Elhillo, and some may be another or others, but ‘they’ are many and their stories contain crossovers and parallels that tell of use, abuse, objectification, and “Desire as violence, desire as cause for harm”. Girls are touched without permission; girls are sold into marriage in exchange for “a cow” or “some gold” – “girl as paintbrush / sent off to stain a sheet”. Images of girls and their virginity as fruit occur more than once, and even if the girl is a child, we read, the men eat; they “peel the girl like young fruit / the pith still bitter / still clinging to the rind”. Drawing from stories in the news, there are certainly a lot of girls whose tales Elhillo can draw upon here.

It’s very powerful poetry in this collection as a result. Although the book’s penultimate poem offers imagery of a female ‘I’ as a tree rather than a piece of fruit (“I sprout leaves. I bear fruit & self-sustain”), the final poem holds terrible, truth-heavy imagery of a girl being stoned to death. However, a flock of birds come and, in a magical imagining, “the girl is untouched / & each bird in its beak tongues a stone”. Perhaps this is an analogy for these poems, in a way, flying with imaginative energy that, in their bellies, still hold harsh and heavy truths. An impressive book as a result in any case, with a fluency and fluidity that makes the reading pleasurable even as it dismays and disturbs.

The Turpentine Tree, Lynne Hjelmgaard (Seren, price: £9.99)

From the general, with girls as cyphers, to the specific, now, in The Turpentine Tree, which recollects and recounts several close personal relationships with friends, family, former lovers, and more. Photographs provide visual impetus for some poems; in others, time travel occurs simply through memory and recollection. In some pieces, a place or a particular encounter causes an association, for example in the poem To Dannie, in which “two magpies linger” and, thinking of her husband, the poet wonders if these birds “sense / deep in their magpie bones / they will mate for life?”

Objects such as a locket provide further gateways into the past so that there’s a sense of a lifestreaming and strung with connection; as all our lives are, really, but in this book that sense is palpable – “the thin wire tightrope of love. You know it’s there / though sometimes you can’t walk it”. It’s not all easy in this book either, however, and even that lovely bird image shifts, in a later poem, revealing birds as “guilt”, birds as “otherworldly spirits / that could prey on weakness”.

Images, meanings, and relationships are complex and multi-layered. “I think the truth is both,” writes the poet in one piece, pointing to the fact that even facts may differ depending on who engages with them and how; views and viewpoints are multiple. And it’s this multiplicity that speaks to me most in this collection, which never forgets that life is a tapestry of relationships, and plumbs its meaning in these through writing that’s fine, fluid, and beautifully florid at times. It felt a bit like reading someone’s diary, with loveliness and loss walking arm in arm – affecting, as a result, but also quite captivating.

Virgula, Sasja Janssen [trans. Michele Hutchison] (Prototype, price: £12)

It’s hard for me to say what this book is about. Titled after the Latin word for a comma, there is, to be sure, a lack of many other punctuation elements in this collection, although they do, infrequently, occur, most notably question marks and, at the end of long passages, full stops. Divided into three sections, each of the passages in sections one and three is addressed to ‘Virgula’, as if to a deity, saint, sister, or penpal (or some admixture of these, as passages / poems offer up a brew of the worldly and otherworldly), whilst in the second section poems begin with the incantatory line “I call upon you”.

So, there are religious stylings, even mystical ones; and since virgula also means ‘divining rod’ or ‘dowsing rod’, there’s a similar sense here of exploring depths, of some kind of searching; of extrasensory perception, even, and of there existing a more spiritual aspect to life, even as it looms, sordid and squalid, filling the pages here with sex, death, rotting pelvises, pregnancy, pissing, and spiders.

The run-along, breathy writing style is set out with line breaks that are often done for purposes of syntax, sentence structure, and meaning. Together, these point to an openness that, at the same time, is also constrained – as in the spirit of a prayer, spell or meditation. Which one this book is I still cannot say, but it impressed me with its flights of imagination, creative fervour, and rich visual imagery, and translator Michele Hutchison must of course also be credited in this. Like a visitation, Virgula will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading. Your views on what it is about – everything, nothing; life, death; the horror of the body, the beauty of it; being lost, finding oneself – are welcome!