New poetry: Evoking sacred spaces and an embattled world

Kaveh Akbar's second collection, Pilgrim Bell (Chatto & Windus, 80pp, £12.99), is woven of exacting, supple, shifting poetry. It answers the call to prayer, and meets it in memory, masculinity and a skilled semantic control. Throughout, Akbar moves elegantly, finding a pinpoint in language on which to turn a point over.

“If you’re immortal, God better be too. Otherwise? Otherwise.” “Heaven”, he writes, “is all preposition – above, among, around, within”, and perhaps that best gets to the heart of these poems, which are constantly aware of some mystery, some spiritual core, or maybe shroud, or weight. As he puts it elsewhere, “There is something terrible / beneath all I am able to say.” On occasion, this quaking terrible thing is revealed through idiom, through flashes of memory and fable. Akbar is tender, vulnerable, but also has a capability for the brutal, for the body’s grotesque as well as for its beauty:

Watch: the devil enters Adam's lips,
crawls through his throat, through his guts
to finally emerge out his anus.
He's all hollow! The devil giggles.
He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long
desperation to be filled.

Akbar is an accomplished formalist with an instinctive trust in the reader. The sacred space beyond, behind, within the poems is carefully evoked by syntactical and allusive shifts. But this is not the compilation of random lines and images sometimes used to evoke a feeling of profundity; in Akbar’s hands, we find an attuned and subtle logic at work, all the better for the lack of explicit relation:

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May I feather
into such a swan soon.
The Book of Things
Not to Touch gets longer
every day: on one
page, the handsome puppy
bred only for service. On
the next, my mother's
face. It's not even enough
to keep my hands to myself –

In one of the collection’s most crystalline and moving images, from a concrete poem, Palace Mosque, Frozen, the eye moves slowly, following an iris flower, “with its ridiculous blossoms / blooming only through the ice”, then shifts into a new focus, encapsulating some of the lyric “mystique” of these beautifully uttered poems: “bright dust / pillowed floor / we see our prayers / as we say them”.

Louise C Callaghan's Moonlight: A Full Moon (Salmon, 78pp, €12) opens with a similarly spiritual tenor: a Cretan lyre is made, threaded with horsetail, and the listeners begin "to move in a circle like trees". The cedarwood lyre, constructed "all of a piece", performs a sort of ritual, making trees of its listeners.

In some poems, like Letter to My Sister, Callaghan invokes a Mahonian range, zooming out to coastal zones, to the refugee crisis, as a counter to Derek Mahon’s own question, from his popular poem Everything Will Be Alright: “How should I not be glad?” Set against the next poem, High Tide Late September, the fragile but comforting peace of a garden room, a sunlit morning, becomes more fraught:

Yet today I learnt of the sea's monstrous
and unpredictable ways. A swimmer,
bathing with countless others –
enjoying the swell of tide at the Forty
Foot, was brushed up against the rocks.
Another wave expanding pulls him back.
With no ability to resist, the body
is thrust once more onto encrusted rock.
Onlookers, and rescuer, made irrelevant.

These are gentle, often quiet poems, moving from the boarding school to Rome to the domestic space during isolation. Callaghan’s voice lends itself well to the latter: she is a fine poet of stillness, brief moments, separation, the elegiac tone, and has a confident sense of the “after-echo” of a line. Throughout, Callaghan shows a good eye for an instantly recognisable image: a bumble bee, bumping against the glass in a foyer of a hotel in winter, will hibernate “in its velvet vest”. Elsewhere, the Luas gives “a warm / exhale from its sliding doors”.

Shaun Hill's debut, warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 72pp, £9.99), wanders through the streets of cities at night, boards buses, encounters hatred, love and moments of brief intimacy. Alive to the erasure of queer history, and to the power of story, these are poems that move into dark spaces. In nightwalking in Exeter, a suicidal speaker is interrupted frequently by the parenthetical happenings of the world around them: the "dull halo of a megabus down a dual carriageway", "cold wind clicking on a crane's metal cage" and, finally, the "blue discus of an ambulance hurtling through the dark".

Nevertheless, there are hopeful moments here, though they take place in an embattled world, punctuated by hate crimes, homophobia and a tyrannical patriarchal influence. There are intimate experiences, vulnerable moments of tenderness, but still, “so much love burns up before we touch it”. The speakers of these poems often feel watched, monitored, surveilled, and seek moments of brief refuge from the capitalist city. dressing room opens:

In the absence of a camera a mirror
is turned against another, so the body
split between them will begin to police itself.

An attention to optics, and to the gaze, pervades warm blooded things, which has a promising cohesiveness and a distinctive vision.

Naush Sabah's pamphlet, Litanies (Guillemot Press, 36pp, £8), is assured and intricately textured. Like Akbar's collection, it is concerned with the sacred, but here the poems are concerned more clearly with a sense of dissent. Litanies is an exciting and auspicious set of poems, and puts Sabah clearly on the poetry radar. It is also unusual in its complex and daring politics.

Of Myths and Messengers inhabits the language of scripture and turns it against “the oracles, the gods and diviners” of YouTube and Facebook Live. “The gods have needs and their messengers have pulpits: / someone must bleed, something must burn and smoke.” The violence of the imagery is sure to make some readers uneasy, but Sabah is a knowing and sometimes wry guide. “Look,” as Of Shadada puts it, “By this sleight of hand / I will make you believe I believe.” Few young poets know how to manipulate artifice so successfully, and few are more successful in playing a game with their reader.

Still, Litanies is by no means all games. One of the standout poems here (and it really is a good poem) is Lament to the Lost Door:

I never got to say goodbye to god,
To raise my cupped hands and ask for one last thing
Or with a mudd of tears, thank him.
Doubt lapped at me in increments
Before it rose, tidal and towering,
My still lake now black sea sucking in its breath.
One day I was a beggar at his door
And the next, the door was lost –

It has a feel of Rilke, but Sabah’s metaphysics are disillusioned, sometimes violent, sometimes plaintive. These poems unearth uncertainties, and prize them:

I'd been anchored, saved by certainties,
Grateful I never tripped on treacherous paths,
That fear and boundaries kept me from the edges.
Now, here I am.
Lord, Lord.