Poetry round-up: True, funny poems in response to Covid-19

Tell the kids who are selling lines
to eff off, through the letterbox.
If you say it in Irish it takes the harm out of it.
Tell them you don't believe them about the first prize
'a part of a goat will be faxed to someone in Antarctica'. (Seal the Freezers)

How was Rita Ann Higgins able to respond to Covid-19, as it unrolled, with the true, funny poems of her Pathogens Love A Patsy (Salmon €12)? Surely poems need time to mulch down if they are to be more than throwaway? But then Higgins knows this kind of soil like the back of her hand – her working-class characters have always known deprivation. Since her poetry gift sprouted in the isolation of a TB Sanatorium more than 40 years ago, Higgins's unrepentant demotic voice has been challenging social orthodoxies. She angles the mirror to our current scattered minds:

I keep getting a reminder on my phone
that I'm running out of road.
Your iCloud is bursting lady, do something.
Will I get the extra storage space?
Or will I delete things?
Say if I delete videos of the kids and regret it.
I regret it already. (I Must Wash Down the Bannisters)

No one is more aware of the snares of official language or adept at exposing the chilling underlying truths. The Memo is the heart of this collection, disarming with humour, it riffs and rhymes, “Spy culture was the vulture/you didn’t want to meet/and you decked out/in puce camouflage lycra/trying to break into/your own mobile home” – three stanzas later the depth charge explodes, a memento mori for us all:

‘Island of my dreams’: Achill’s painters

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Angrynomics: charting a new course to redress imbalance between capital and labour

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John Banville plays with the mystery novel’s cliches to fine effect

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elders in nursing homes were
numbers to be counted –
but do they really count
when push comes to shove?
Don't mention shove to me
or an older memo comes to mind
the one that called
longtime hospital patients trespassers.
That memo gave 'minimum force rights'
to overworked nurses to get them – trespassers – out of that bed.
Bed blockers was another barb floated.

Leeanne Quinn's Some Lives (Dedalus €12.50) is in a very different register, the voice much quieter, although her title echoes Higgins's renowned poem Some People. Quinn, like Higgins, is deeply interested in people.

The lives here are those of dissident poet-activists of the early 20th century – Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Jakob van Hoddis. Crowds of the dead walk these pages, her fine lyrics exercising pitch-perfect line control:

A man walks out in a dead man's
clothes, still holding the shape
of the dead man's body. (The Distant Past)

Repetition and counter point is key, Quinn’s cadences like Tsvetaeva’s ever-returning, ever-puzzling sea waves:

…Is that the sea?
That's not the sea at all, not at all
like the sea. And, of course, how could it be?
The sea holds you horizontal,
what can I do with that?
Waves cannot be walked, the sea
can only bring me under,
like love…

The title poem, a tremendous sustained feat, weaves blocks of compelling narrative prose poetry with her delicate translations of van Hoddis:

I read a poem about the end of the world, shouts
echo in the air, roofers topple from buildings…
…The tides are rising, almost everyone
has a cold.

The scope here is astounding – historical events made prescient while modern grave recycling is juxtaposed chillingly with urban living:

In July scaffolding goes up around our building.
For the next four months we live inside
as roofers tile, sand, and insulate the stone.

Within this deadly circle, Mandelstam's arrest is pinned down in unforgettable lines:

…The single egg sits untouched
on the table until Akhmatova hands it to Osip,
insisting he eats …
…it is almost impossible
to forget the image of this egg, balancing baldly
on the table while the house and its occupants are harassed
and turned out. Akhmatova handing over
the egg, Osip sitting down, salting the egg, eating it,
before he is walked out for interrogation…

Rachel Long is the third original and arresting voice here, her debut My Darling from the Lions (Picador £10.99) driven by grappling conflict:

I join you on the balcony. You hold me from behind,
lean us over, count...
We're as many storeys up as our age gap.
Why do you always have to –
Shhh. You lift my dress. I shoulder-width my legs,
is love not this? – gripping a fence in the sky. (Hotel Art, Barcelona)

These are smart witty poems on race, religion, sexuality with a striking hair-themed central section but it’s their grasp of the precarious unknown that makes them powerful, fresh and new, as in this sexual hunt on a London council estate:

Run!
In these hooves?
Through an estate built like Tetris?
Have you ever fled uphill –
hill of concrete,
acres of balconies identical
unanswerable doors –
reciting Psalm 23?

The men are mostly off-stage while the women loom large and articulate. There is the daring poet herself and her best friend Tiff who’s

… clocked
the boys have clocked the difference between
a tissue and a tit, a sock and a tit, but not quite yet
a tit and a slice of bread…

Or Helena a dancer, raped by the club bouncer yet coming up fighting in a funny, mimetic, utterly disquieting monologue, “pressing my head down like it was a f**king apple into that rancid sofa…” But “Mum” is the tumultuous conflicted power, the star of her finest poems:

You don't have to believe me. It will take an incredible
leap of faith. My sister put a snake – a huge one, the kind
that swallows lambs…
…didn't belong to
this realm, wasn't of the physical, you see...
I could feel it moving…
The migraines, my God, they were cosmic…
Of course they would've said I was crazy.
Can you imagine? – Excuse me, Doctor Mangwana,
I can feel a snake on my head. (Mum's Snake)

Reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s The Madmen, its hilarious realism underpinned by a powerful and psychological sense of Nigerian sacred mythologies, I found myself believing, mesmerised, taking that “incredible leap”.