Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic: poetry in a world shaped by a boy's killing

The poetry of allegory seems to require a style which risks bare-bones sparseness, patiently avoiding idioms or historical references which might tip the reader off too quickly to any one ostensible subject.

Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic (Faber, £10.99) adopts just such a simple style: clear but affectless images are set alongside matter-of-fact reports of violence in the book's imagined republic, a world shaped by the killing of a deaf boy by soldiers.

In response, the boy’s community “refused to hear soldiers”, and their deafness becomes a “barricade”, a resistance. The bereaved mother, Sonya’s shout is “a/ hole torn in the sky, it shimmers the park benches, porchlights./ We see in Sonya’s open mouth // the nakedness/ of a whole nation”.

Deaf Republic should compel readers on this side of the Atlantic

The eeriness of this deaf republic, where “quiet hisses like a match dropped in water”, is found as much in its puppet shows as in the violence between the soldiers and the deaf. Kaminsky also introduces a sign language into the poem, through which the citizens can communicate, in spite of the military occupation, and which – in a bold move – the book asks us too to learn to read.

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Like Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, which sheds allegorical light on Salazar’s Portugal, but was not limited to that one context, Kaminsky’s book aspires to a universal application, but invites us to look again at one country in particular, one in which “neighbours open // their phones to watch/ a cop demanding a man’s driver license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop/ shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. // It is a peaceful country. // We pocket our phones and go.”

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize, one of the five second collections which comprise this year’s oddly skewed list, Kaminsky’s book bears comparison with other excellent North American imports of recent years: Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine and Danez Smith. Deaf Republic should also compel readers on this side of the Atlantic.

Unusual premise

One notable absentee from the Forward list is Canadian Karen Solie's The Caiplie Caves (Picador, £10.99), another book with an unusual premise, as it introduces the seventh-century Irish saint Ethernan as its main speaker and protagonist. Solie identifies with Ethernan's decision to retreat to the caves of Fife, whose "foggy, dispute-ridden landscape" becomes the site for her poems' reflections. This may seem an obscure starting point, but Solie is a brilliant stylist and the poems deliver line after memorable line, combining smart, tough-guy statement and a profusion of striking images, as when A Plenitude moves from,
My many regrets have become the great passion of my life./ One may also grow fond of what there isn't/ much of. Grass of Parnassus -/ and when you finally find it, it's just okay
to this lyrical and just as tonally complex ending:
Purple toadflax, common mouse ear,/ orchids, trefoils, buttercup, self-heal,/ the Adoxa moschatellina it's too late in the year for,/ I can hardly stand to look at them./ And all identified after the fact / but for the banks of wild roses, the poppies you loved/ parked like an ambulance by the barley field.

The Caiplie Caves is a great exhilaration of a book, casually distributing stunning and gladdening poems from all kinds of observations and occasions. Solie is as at home writing about shags who perch “on vertebral rock near the Caiplie Caves/ like shreds of an outline or shadows freed/ of their antecedents”, as re-telling a fable of “Kentigern and the Robin” about a resurrected bird whose voice is “like a rope into the place it had been/ where all communication is one-way”, or referencing an online article about Edinburgh’s United Glass Company in You Can’t Go Back.

An unlikely subject, but Solie is an old hand at writing self-reflexive poems about factories – and must be surprised that no one else has muscled in on the territory. This one, with typically bold and open implications, “released at intervals/ balloons of smoke with fire inside, like ideas // off the top of its head, that like ideas were more impressive/ after dark. Never did it not answer the question posed by its existence”.

Close observations

What Planet (Bloodaxe, £9.95) is Edinburgh-based Belfast poet Miriam Gamble's third collection, and again presses her close observations and memories into the service of portraits – of family, of animals, especially cats and horses – and self-portraits. While she writes in Urn, "I have never let into my poems life's/ rich jumble I am tough/ too true I was anorexic who/ wants to hear it here is world made metaphor/ words like a hummingbird's bill/ siphoning the inner nectar", her poems make good, punishing use of that rich jumble.

Louis MacNeice is an influence, as he is for many of her contemporaries, but what makes Gamble’s poems distinctive is how finicky they are about sound, dodging iambic rhythms, and pushing together spondees and trochees, testing alliterative and assonantal patterns, cramping the sounds so that the poem’s voice feels as if it is emerging under pressure, and in a hurry.

Among this strong book’s stand-out poems is a fine addition to the recent literature of the lost art of handwriting (see also Colette Bryce’s A Simple Modern Hand). Gamble’s Handwriting notices “the Basildon Bond pad/ with the ruled guide sheet/ continues to be stowed/ in the head-high cabinet” and “a hand you recognise/ for its spindle of solidity” which becomes “knuckled with growths”.

A different aesthetic is announced in Derek Coyle's first book, Reading John Ashbery In Costa Coffee, Carlow (Magnus Grehn Forlag, €12). Funny, slight and quick on their feet, the poems channel O'Hara more than Ashbery, and also possess some of Paul Durcan's desire to say what has not been said before. The title poem includes these typically unlikely and freewheeling lines on the Costa, formerly a Pizza Hut, in Carlow:
Mecca, Lourdes, or even Las Vegas
have nothing on it. If it wasn't too cold
we'd even have a naked cowboy
on the Hanover Roundabout, only
he'd be playing a big silver banjo
instead of a guitar.
There's a guy over in the corner
I fancy from the gym.

Full of daft scenarios, and antic asides, in Carlow Poem #55, he writes, “If Frank O’Hara/ could write poem/ on his lunchbreak/ why can’t I?/ After my afternoon nap,/ of course. I couldn’t/ write a poem before 12:00./ That would be immoral”.