Nights On The Line, M.S. Evans (Black Bough Poetry, price: £6)

For those who ever read, and loved, the tales of Kerouac as he train-hopped across the USA comes poetry pamphlet Nights On The Line – as slender and springy as we imagine the author to be, and containing poems that offer up a narrative of night and day traversing America in similar On The Road-epic style. What makes this book different is that the writing is by a woman, and the adventures are as well.

The poems are imagistic and often haiku-like: brief, painting scenes in a bare-branch calligraphic style that blossoms out towards the lyrical. Many poems are of, or utilise imagery of, the body; several of the poems speak of loss, particularly of a grandmother, but also there’s beauty, joy, anger, fear, and all the highs, heights, valleys, and general journeying of life itself. 

These are fine poems that gleam out from the page and remain, like the trees within these poems and scenes, evergreen in the mind of the reader; it’s a book that I’d recommend women in particular to pick up and take with them on an impromptu adventure – you can do it, too, this poet says. Inspiring stuff, from Black Bough Poetry, a new publisher and great supporter of poets and poetry generally, so do take a look.

Arctic Elegies, Peter Davidson (Carcanet Press, price: £11.99)

Meter isn’t terribly fashionable at the moment, but when it’s done well it’s immersive and persuasive, particularly for the poet-reader, showcasing the power of pace and meter’s capability and capacity to reflect subject, control tone, and so on. It seems particularly fitting for an elegy – a poem of loss/remembrance – in which the emotional timbre and tone of a poem can be heightened through this restriction, rather than by letting a poem hang loose, tearing its hair out and wailing.

This metric intensity makes Arctic Elegies a measured, compelling read, the differing pace of each piece perfectly suited to the subject at hand, whether that’s the ghost of a person, a season, or a spit of land. All are, in their own ways, eroding, disappearing, and this is a book which highlights such ever-present passing. As a result, this is a book brimming with spirits, fog, twilight, snowflakes, drifts, pale moons, frozen seas, dark gardens, frost, and thorns. Although stars make several appearances, and there are fireflies, torches, meteor showers, and moons, this collection mostly contemplates darkness, shadows and “fading light”.

There’s a gothic, almost chilling sense to proceedings, therefore, which is in tune with the old fashioned meter, as if these poems come from a deeper place, and an older voice, despite contemporary cleverness and modern ideas (The Museum Of Loss is one such, and very good indeed). It makes the book feel both light and weighty at the same time and, like a glacier or meteor shower, leaves a powerful impression on the reader.

Fierce Scrow, Éadaoín Lynch (Nine Pens, price: £7.50)

What I love about Fierce Snow are the twin inspirations of myth and local language which provide a rich impetus for many of the poems, so much so that Gaelic words and dialect phrases are often the titles themselves, including that of the entire book. The realm of the dead or the rebirth of a saint are just as fitting a subject matter as anything more contemporary, and language slides between these rich, traditional phrases and stories and those which are more modern with deftness and delightful ease.

Part of an ongoing series of poetry publications from Nine Pens, this collection’s distinctive cover harbours a similarly distinctive voice. Particular favourites for me were the poem to Anne Lister – recently dramatised/popularised in the BBC series Gentleman Jack – and a sweet little poem about botanical gardens, full of lush imagery in which “Bluebirds [sing] from bluebells”. Survival, loss, and life continuing on are all themes of this thoughtful, vibrant collection, and flowers are often emblematic of this, right up to the fuchsia of the final poem’s final stanza: “Every summer it bloody a thousand brilliant sirens”. Wow, to that one, though it’s a wonderful read all round.

Haruko / Love Poems, June Jordan (Serpent’s Tail, price: £9.99)

Straight-talking June Jordan’s great, direct, American style reminds me a little of Charles Bukowski, a little of Maya Angelou. The poems in this reissue of Haruko/Love Poems are lucid, strong, and accessible, singing of sexual desire and resistance against tyrannies. This defiance is tempered by a deep-felt sense of life’s beauty, we well as its transience, perhaps best summarised by this short, haiku-like piece:

plum blossom plum jam
even the tree becomes something 
more than a skeleton
longing for the sky

Spectacular, I’m sure you’ll agree. The poems in the book are mostly poem-shaped, with some experimentation, here and there, in form or style; what’s consistently offered, irrespective of this, is a depth of feeling and a vibrancy which just sings out from the page. You get the impression that Jordan, who died in 2002, was a woman who embraced life fully, and that transmits to the reader, giving a sense of richness and a compulsion to do the same. Despite all the -isms, -phobias, and prejudices of her times, Jordan was a believer in – and a writer about – that great poetic theme, love, and this book is proof positive that to do so is not sentimental or saccharine, but the mark of a great heart and soul.

Goliat, Rhiannon Hooson (Seren, price: £9.99)

Named after a Russian oilfield, Goliat takes things which are modern – streets, gardens, coffee houses, spaceships – and renders them, generally, in such a painterly way that all are rendered rich, resonant, and redolent of a time when tapestries hung on the wall and fires were the only source of heating. The spaceship poem, Event Horizons, is more clipped, offering up a particular voice, but where the voice appears to be Hooson’s, there’s a richness in these poems that seems not just timeless but to traverse – and to originate from – another century: like Andrew Marvell reincarnated, perhaps.

Several of the poems in Goliat are in other voices, however, and there are poems that veer through time as well as space. Still, there’s a kind of beauty, a sort of romance, even in pieces where we cramp inside a ‘leech house’ or in the wonderfully titled Dung Beetle Love Poem. In Rat Boy, Hooson proves that she can be crisp, curt, and less lyrical, and another poem offers “a long dark shop once filled with / faded VHS” and a bar whose music is likened to “a damp beermat”; but my overall sense of deep richness remains, after reading, and I would ask you to read the book to find out if you feel the same. Deep inks, a clever mind, and a wide imagination – recommended.