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The best recent poetry – review roundup

<span>Photograph: Kevin Elsby/Alamy Stock Photo</span>
Photograph: Kevin Elsby/Alamy Stock Photo


The title of Carolyn Forché’s new collection seems prophetic. Seventeen years in the making, In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe £10.99) is an act of witness, going repeatedly into the darkness of death and loss. It’s no elegy for a pandemic, but it is a series of portraits of modern history and war: of manmade losses. There are massacres, refugees, and individuals who disappear alone into the turmoil of world events. Yet these fierce elegies are also beautiful: “Light pealed, bell-like, through the canopy. Long ago or seems so. / Then the ghost of a deer and crows flapping through smoke.” Forché’s almost incantatory way with image produces a strange tone, spell-bound but also emotionally charged, in which time and place shift and blur – because we’re all implicated: “Eventually, we are all asked who we are. […] / All who come into the world are sent.”

Forché’s work speaks with deep certainty. At first reading, Jane Hirshfield’s Ledger (Bloodaxe £10.99) couldn’t seem more different. It’s a six-part volume of poems, many short, which often feel fractured or seem to struggle with what they have to say. But there’s nothing tricksy about this intimate, tender free verse. As Hirshfield’s title poem tells us, the most important measure of anything is its meaning, and Ledger is a compassionate look at – and yes, elegy for – “our catalogued vanishing unfinished heaven”. That “heaven” is the lost paradise of the natural world that we depredated even as we discovered it. Hirshfield perfectly captures our individual sense of lostness, faced with undeniable catastrophe, while invoking our collective responsibility: “Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.”

Today’s new publishing lists are giving readers what they want, though old habits of coverage can die hard. Disproportionately overlooked are non-metropolitan poets such as Ruth Stacey, whose second collection, the mysterious and fabular I, Ursula (V. Press £10.99) appears from an award-winning West Midlands micropublisher. The book conjures a Dantesque lost forest, where foxes and wild children wrestle amid the spells and rhymes of oral tradition: “Apricot is the colour / of a setting ball of / flame, my beloved.” But in this piercingly unsentimental report from Angela Carter territory, the most dangerous “beast” is already “in the house”.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) is a poet readers return to for major feats of imagination and consolation. Less well known to English readers is his prodigiously assorted prose, ranging from art history to the imaginative hinterland of L’Arrière-pays. So Yves Bonnefoy: Prose (Carcanet £30), a selection expertly and economically edited by Stephen Romer, Anthony Rudolf and John Naughton, and translated by many distinguished hands, is an indispensable read. For Bonnefoy, poetry is “born of terror”. Its job is “to re-establish openness and this matters because of what such openness to thought and feeling offers us. Not least, hope: ‘At the moment when so much night is gathering, could we be on the verge of the true light?’”

Fiona Sampson’s Come Down is published by Corsair.