There’s been so much lively poetry this year that it’s been hard to choose my favourites. To begin with, two massive yellow bricks - J.H. Prynne’s late work in one convenient volume, and Mimi Khalvati’s long-awaited Collected Poems. Two debut collections I loved were Scott McKendry’s Gub (what a joy when a book of poems actually makes you laugh out loud), and Camille Ralphs’s ambitious and effervescent After You Were, I Am, I think my favourite book of the year. New collections from Jamie McKendrick, Claudine Toutoungi and Carrie Etter were also real highlights.
My favourite non-poetry book I’ve read this year was probably Helen Castor’s magisterial The Eagle and the Hart: epic, but at the same time bringing out the fine grain of character, so that the doomed Richard II feels like someone you’ve actually met.
From the publisher:
This extraordinary debut heralds the arrival of a major new talent.In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. The book’s three sections – ingenious rewritings of…
From the publisher:
J.H. Prynne is Britain’s leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes…
From the publisher:
Demons, geese, The Laughing Cow, marching bands, LSD and pistols smuggled home from the USSR. You'll find all these in Scott McKendry's GUB. Rooted in the language of working-class Belfast, and slipping between eras and time zones, closing…
From the publisher:
The author of She-Wolves chronicles the lives and reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins whose rivalry brought their nation to the brink of disintegration - and back again'A dazzling tour de force of epic royal history: a…
From the publisher:
King's Gold Medal for PoetryMimi Khalvati, one of our best-loved poets, was born in Tehran, Iran, and sent away to boarding school on the Isle of Wight at the age of six, only returning to her family in Iran when she was seventeen. The loss…
From the publisher:
Emotional Support Horse tracks the tragicomedy of grief, and out of low vision, bereavement and eco-stress blends poems of startling wit, verve and solace. A woman longs to transform into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian…
From the publisher:
Carrie Etter’s Grief’s Alphabet is a shattering elegy for the poet’s mother, opening a pathway through grief in spite of the impossible task of expressing such a loss. The collection evokes the complex, intimate…
From the publisher:
Jamie McKendrick's Drypoint depicts the turbulent present with incisive detail while often taking us back to an equally conflictual Biblical or classical world. Acute and stoical in tone, these poems transport us by bus or ferry or ghostly…
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