Named this year as the 24th poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón is a poet who should be read widely here in Ireland. Her sixth collection, The Hurting Kind (Corsair, £12.99), is now published on this side of the Atlantic, and it is capacious, generous and deeply felt while retaining an assured and careful formal skill.
These poems are full of movement: Limón might start with a memory or an image (the sighting of a kingfisher, or a field of horses), but the thought turns swiftly and always unexpectedly, being traced over place and time until a jewel-like significance is retrieved. In one of the collection’s most breathtaking poems, Not the Saddest Thing in the World, we find ourselves in a pandemic year (a year that is “huge and round and awful”), with the speaker finding a dead fledgling, “embryonic” and “see-through”. Before burying it, she sends photographs to her family, with the sense that death should be witnessed. Then, gloriously and movingly, the poem undertakes one of Limón’s trademark emotional expansions:
Once it has been witnessed
and buried, I go about my day, which isn’t
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I went to the cinema to see Small Things Like These. By the time I emerged I had concluded the film was crap
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ordinary, exactly, because nothing is ordinary
now even when it is ordinary. Now, something’s
breaking always on the skyline, falling over
and over against the ground, sometimes
unnoticed, sometimes covered up like sorrow,
sometimes buried without even a song.
The bird becomes the image of collective grief and the inability to properly witness the deaths of loved ones during lockdown. Over and over again in The Hurting Kind, in poems such as Foaling Season and Open Water, Limón finds these miraculous, often wounding through-lines into the heart. Readers will treasure this book.
In his latest collection, The Slain Birds (Jonathan Cape, £12), Michael Longley continues to be pitch-perfect. The exploration of the elegy, which has been so prominent in his recent collections, remains here, the title giving a sense of ecological connections between various losses. Often, the poems link one death with another, as in Funeral, which attains the sort of elegant simplicity that is the fruit of a lifetime’s close attention:
The day Catherine died
Sarah found a dead wren
Outside her studio:
She lifted it up
On a teaspoon and
Carried it with care
To its bracken grave.
Longley’s method of allowing crystal-clear imagery to speak for itself reads as though it comes from the mind of a writer so enchanted with life as to trust completely in its resonance. There is little in the way of flourish or extrapolation: he knows just when to step back and let the world do the speaking.
A daring connection is often drawn with such subtlety as to make it feel spur-of-the-moment, dipping back across decades, bringing ghosts and memories into the present evoked by nature. A birdsong recalls a birdsong heard years before, in the company of another; or, in a moving inversion of the trope, Nightingale recalls a song not heard with another, a moment of the unrecoverable heartbreakingly recovered on the page.
There is always a pulse of the sacred behind Longley’s vision of loss. In Primate, a poem for the endangered kipunji of Tanzania, he situates us immediately, spiritually and sensually in the position of the animal:
Think of being discovered
Among forest shadows,
Leafy lianas that fit
Your fingers and toes,
Over your shoulders
A silvery kimono,
Your soul awaiting
The echo of your name.
What is noticeable in Longley’s latest work is the democratic eye to the various crafters of the world: the bird sits alongside the painter, the poet alongside the flower, as an exquisite artisan. The reader of this sensitive and attuned work leaves with the sense of the delicate, sacred tapestry of making that occurs not just within but beyond the human. It is a real gift.
Debut collection
Another poet of heart-rending elegies is Selina Nwulu, whose debut collection, A Little Resurrection (Bloomsbury, £9.99), joins the stellar new poetry imprint edited by Kayo Chingonyi. Opening in supreme style with the prose poem Conversations at the Bus Stop: Angel, Nwulu weaves elegies for her departed father, a migrant of the Windrush generation, alongside wider interventions on racial politics in Britain and further afield.
Nwulu captures the disorientation and far-reaching impact of grief with brilliant skill, observing here and in other poems how great loss encompasses rage, dissociation and magical thinking:
I’ve been an angel before. No big deal, but it’s true. I’ve held a man as he lay dying. You never know how you’ll feel when it’s the end. That day, the rest of us had nothing to do but turn celestial. […]
An angel trying to make everything as easy as possible. Selfless, that’s me – meaning a part of me became less that day. Now I leave all my doors open, waiting for my return.
Elegiac poems such as Dandelion, One Year and Carousel are also brilliant in displaying the hope-filled past which exists outside the depleted present.
A Little Resurrection showcases a variety of tones, too; notably in poems such as Softboi Columbus, an irony-soaked address to “one of the good ones” (read: not good), a lover who quotes bell hooks and mirrors imperial inheritance in his vision of the “dark continent” of the black body. Inherited trauma is the converse here, and picked up in the poem Safekeeping, in which a mother has “passed on her war” into the daughter’s psyche, “That I might know/ I come from a lineage of long prayer/ and fears I have no weapons for.”
Deportation and white terror hang over this book and their tremors are felt in both the private and the public poems of A Little Resurrection, and solace is found in the joyous cultural solidarity of Cords That Cannot Be Broken: “What a gift to be your own church”.
Frank McGuinness’s latest collection, May Twenty-Second (Gallery Press, €12.95), is full of history, the ghosts of ancestors and the ghosts of those swept away by the passing of time. The title of the book, in fact, comes from The Women With No Shadows, a haunted poem tracing a group of ghostly figures – women who search the woods for a lost child, who fight, who leave their sorrows in the dark:
They drench the sky, they kiss the sea.
Flowers in Maytime grow.
They have me as hey reared me,
the women with no shadows.
The murdered journalist Lyra McKee is elegised in a disturbing poem which sees the killing through the eyes of seven different film directors, from Akira Kurosawa to Agnès Varda. There are comic poems, too, as in the poem for “the sodomite” Mark Smeaton – a musician at the court of Henry VIII – which is full of sensory detail and also a sly humour, as in the nod to Smeaton’s bisexuality in “the smell of hart and hind off him”.
May Twenty-Second places long sequences (notably 23 poems about Goya) alongside bright and unnerving musical verses, such as the memorable and unsettling Underneath the Stairs, which has a dark control and brilliant gothic atmosphere. The sense of the disembodied, of the pen being moved by ghostly intent, is a fitting emblem of this collection, which is attuned to history and to its pervasive influences:
Do fathers hate mothers, beyond the reach
of mountains, asphodels, fingers moving,
writing, Who lives here, underneath the stairs?
