The Arctic Diaries, Melissa Davies (Arachne Press, price: £4-£9.99)

The Arctic Diaries is a great example of what poetry can do in our quickly changing world. Here, the poem’s stories have been written in Fleinvær, a remote Arctic archipelago in the north of Norway, including tales gathered from the last surviving fishermen of Langholmen, a small island in Øygarden, Hordalan, with the poet working over just one arctic winter to gather and write this collection. Research through immersion; and creativity that comes from real life and real people, rather than just imagination; are some fine feats on the part of the poet, and make this particular book noteworthy from the start.

A poem within is, in fact, even called Immersion – a highly sensory piece, it shows a person experiencing cold, rain and, at the same time, gutting a fish. Good use of alliteration and assonance knit the poem together, and short lines give it a blading, rain-spear-like sense. It’s just one example of how immediacy within the every day, along with thoughtful use of poetic form and technique, are intertwined by the poet to create something brilliant and affecting. Natural beauty, the power of myth, domestic routine, and life’s harshness in such a climate are all themes of this book, which I found particularly spellbinding; reading this collection felt very much like entering another realm, a kind of arctic odyssey. Beautifully detailed, and finely composed, The Arctic Diaries is an imaginative, inspiring, and – yes – very immersive book indeed.

Street Sailing, Matt Gilbert (Black Bough Poetry, price: £8.95)

Assonance and alliteration again seem prominent when beginning to read this debut collection, Street Sailing. I recall former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy referring to this auric intertwining of such techniques as ‘texturing’ – knitting a poem together so that, instead of end rhymes, repeating consonant and vowel sounds, as well as techniques such as internal or half-rhyme, bind the poem together. Really, this sort of stuff is my absolute favourite thing, because it demonstrates the artistry and craft of poetry writing – and, here, I can say that we see texturing at its very finest.

Clever and clear-eyed, the poet – as the title Street Sailing suggests – ‘sails’ through streets, observing, and then outlining and animating, these sights – and insights – in his poems. The pieces are, very often, sensory, and there are some startling moments that flare in the reader’s mind and imagination as a result, as in the poem Garden Bag Resurrection: “A crumpled, green face sags / beneath the hedge, revealing age lines / born of foliage”. The inanimate is thus brought to life, enlivened and personified, and this kind of clever poetry-magic is what makes this collection, in turn, an enlivening, enlightening read. It encourages you to go out and see your own streets through new eyes… The first and last words of Street Sailing are the word ‘awake’, and this is definitely how these poems seem, and how they feel to me; to transmit such a sense to a reader is no mean feat – in fact, it is an act of high magic. Let these poems work their wonder upon you!

The Recycling, Joey Connolly (Carcanet, price: £9.35-£12.99)

A Kandinsky artwork on the cover of The Recycling alludes to the fact that herein are poems that are arty, well-crafted, and stylish – and so they are. As the title then suggests, ‘ecopoetry’ is the focus here; but this begins most cleverly, by offering up several pages of quotations from other authors. It’s a form of literary recycling, then, which is, in addition, slightly humorous, and maybe even a little bit mocking of the many quotes so many poets seem to cram into their collections (usually in the opening pages) these days.

Humour is very much a part of proceedings, as is intelligence, in this book, and the two together form an admixture that, for me, is a tonic, in all the best senses of that phrase. Smart, experimental, often upending traditional forms and ways of setting out a poem – for instance, cutting lines in unexpected places; inserting one poem ‘within’ another – are all part of proceedings; and, indeed, forms, bones, and what’s within is something that’s often touched upon: “its truth is utterly concealed, hidden as a skeleton / in something living”; “Like finding an apple / with another, smaller apple in the middle”. Connolly is a poet who’s keen to dig, discover truths, and pierce through to the centre of things, and perhaps humour is a necessary part of this – in one hand he wields something silly; in the other, a shining scalpel… The comic is maybe also necessary when the tragic – climate change, in this case – is palpable: “What sweet sorrow / to persist within this disappeared world”. Altogether, The Recycling is heady, hearty, daring, and decidedly innovative – a book to get properly swept up into, and away with.

The Cat Prince & Other Poems, Michael Pederson (Corsair Poetry, price: £12.99)

Wow – a hardback poetry book! Such things are rare because poetry is not often viewed as being worth such large financial outlay (despite it being, again in my opinion, a vessel which carries the very soul of humanity…); impressive, too, are the long list of testimonials / endorsements on the back cover – national poets, radio poets, famous poets…

I think what I personally like most about The Cat Prince is its lively experimentation with language: many of the words even seem quite childlike, and give a fizzy, fun sense to proceedings: “chuckleberries”; “budbursts”; “cumbrous”; “bamboozling”; “egg-teeth”; “bumfuzzling”. These playful words slide with ease into other words, phrases, and pairings that feel more Shakespearian – and point to the fact that bards love words, and enjoy having fun with them, actually!

Despite some dark and stark subjects – the brutal death of a friend, as one example – the language leaps, by its very inventiveness, towards life and, as in a phrase from one of the book’s culminating poems, “it’s surplus gorgeous” as a result, a real joy to read. Is Pederson a poet’s poet, in a way? Yes, perhaps, but so are most poets, usually, as poetry is very little read by those who don’t also write it (but prove me wrong – please…) – and one of The Cat Prince‘s final images, in its penultimate poem, of a shop in which “poetry stacks the shelves” is one that will resonate with scribblers, scribes, and verse-ifiers everywhere.

The soul is important… Life is rich… Amidst balconies, “blowies”, “bad days”, and other subjects, Pederson presents the world as vibrant, wonderful, and startling, as is his language, and as are the poems here.