January’s best new poetry: Ilhan Sami Çomak; Peter Davidson; Meena Kandasamy; Medbh McGuckian

The incarcerated Kurdish poet Ilhan Sami Çomak has published nine collections of poetry from within the confines of Turkey’s Silivri prison – the country’s highest-security prison, situated north of Istanbul. Mostly written in Turkish, these poems are remarkable in the lushness of their vision, which has an uncanny and moving ability to recall the world outside of those walls. This is a poetry replete with sunshine, the growth of flowers, the moving seasons of the world and of life. As the opening poem shows, the passionate blend of sensual detail and conviction is characteristic of Çomak’s work:

And the tree’s shade buckles,

birds give all they know to their wings.

The wind blows an ovation and from the sun

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comes the need to touch.

It is these leaves language

and sweetness are addressing,

now that the time for transgression has come.

Edited by Caroline Stockford, with translations by Stockford and seven other poets, Separated from The Sun (Smokestack, £9.99) is not only the product of a mind “seeded with flight”, but also one that reaches out for life and justice beyond the prison walls. At the centre of the book is a series of poems responding to missives from other poets. A terrifying and hallucinatory response to British poet Alice Oswald gives a sense of the distress that counters Çomak’s passionate reaching towards freedom:

The crucifix of the desert

Entered time’s eyes, slipped, knowing the ruggedness of earth,

Slipped, breaking the mirror of existence and nothing.

Fright took form in my body, came and sat in life’s voice.

Another work of beautiful and resonant translated poetry out this month is Meena Kandasamy’s The Book of Desire (Galley Beggar, £14.99), a version of the third part of one of the most important texts in Tamil literature, the Tirukkural. This 2000-year-old poem is introduced by Kandasamy with a trademark blend of warmth and polemic, bringing a feminist, decolonial approach to this poem of love, longing and eroticism. The section of the poem translated here consists of 250 kurals divided into 25 chapters. The kural – a poem in two lines measured in seven feet, the first line having four feet and the second three – gives a tight formal rigour, and also, as Kandasamy notes, lends itself to easy memorisation.

The Tamil scholar Francious Gros describes each kural as a ‘multifaceted diamond’: each is ‘the dewdrop on the blade of millet which reflects the towering palm tree’, and this relationship between the condensed and the expansive is well-captured in Kandasamy’s renderings. In The Book of Desire, the lovers confess, exploring the territories and affects of desire, in passionate, feeling verse:

A little

stolen glance

is so much more

than so much sex.

She looked,

Looking gushed forth –

These, the currents, the cascades

In the grammars of our love.

While I look at her,

she gazes at the ground

While I look away,

she looks at me, smiling.

These verses lodge in the memory, and can appear to take the form of the epigram, which is part of their brilliance, but within the context of the poem they take part in a dance and conversation with the journey of the lovers. Separation, sex, friendship, and the games of withholding and anxiety are all addressed, and none with prudishness or judgment. In this way, Kandasamy has written a version of this text that feels both ancient and modern. This poem moves from the ornate to the piercing, and no reader will find themselves left out of its fundamental language of yearning:

He has a strict guard

banning my entry to his heart.

Isn’t he shameless, then,

to constantly walk into mine?

Peter Davidson’s Arctic Elegies (Carcanet, £9.99) moves us into a desolation and wonder of grief, history and polar weather. Fixing the reader in a landscape of ghostly voices, early Christian faith, British history and the crystalline and brutal elements, these poems adopt and create song forms, giving an eerie and unsettling tone that combines the archaic and the modern in striking ways. The opening poem, Jacobite Song, is a riddling, hypnotic beginning that sets the tone for the collection as a whole:

The falcon flown, far in the starving air

So many lost, this long, half-secret war.

The regiments like snow all overborne

The boat rowed far from the cold shore, long gone.

O blackbird taken in the fowler’s snare

He is now far who will return no more.

The best poem in the book, however, is the title poem, Arctic Elegy, a six-part sequence ‘”for the Franklin expedition of 1845-48″. Here, Davidson’s skill with rhyme and an almost-liturgical syntax give a tense and moving atmosphere, prescient with “the patience of the snow” and the “violence of the cold”:

Cold England mourns in fog and fallen leaves

November twilight drowns bare avenues;

And all my life is evening since you are gone –

Rain in the dark, my long desolation.

O weeping England is a house full of ghosts:

Voices at nightfall, whispers amongst dry leaves,

Shadows of young men lost among rocks and snows.

One of our finest and most enigmatic poets, Medbh McGuckian returns with The Thankless Paths to Freedom (Gallery, €12.95). McGuckian’s previous collection, Marine Cloud Brightening, was a prescient and sometimes terrifying examination of climate change, stitched with apocalyptic imagery. Here, though, we turn (obliquely) historical, though the landscape is ever present. McGuckian works suggestively, refusing the easy sentiment:

My notebook was like my garden,

iris garden, storm-water garden.

It holds, slows and cleans water

to a nearly vivid streak.

The decade of centenaries permeates these poems through images of prisons, sacrifice, privilege, and isolation. Illness, too, abounds. In Nine Types of Solitude, the speaker is locked in but contrarian, chastising as well as being on the brink of despair:

Angels are sophisticated machines,

not alive, not people who go freely

to unravel into silence. Everyone complains

of the time of too late, of the lack of news,

though there has never been so much

as a cloud’s response. I stare

at the unpolluted sky all night,

night-wedded to the Lord of the Near,

to find something worth saying

about the lyrical halo of illness.

As with all of McGuckian’s intricate work, there is real texture to the form of these poems – a propulsive alliteration, an attention to internal rhyme, to rhythm – that allows the poems to flow and communicate a sense beyond literal meaning. They become, also, vehicles of affect, of sensation, of music. “Time’s hand / touching, after time has flown, hangs the dated / death by a blue heavenly, a reckless / blossoming”. Present, too, are crystalline images that hint at the political, at social change, without ever fully giving up their secrets. This is a glinting and ornamented world that slips in and out of the real and the dream, the past and the present, delivering its message through the subconscious, though hinting always at real critique. The curve of the streets, in the poem Star Patient, for example, is “like a jewel box tormenting / the altar steps”.