Paul Muldoon’s unique sound garden of poetry is once again on display in his 15th collection ‘Joy In Service on Rue Tagore’ (Faber, £14.99). The playful yet serious language that has become Muldoon’s trademark is evident in this collection, making him an easily identifiable voice in modern poetry. The application of ‘muldynamic’ techniques to various themes such as conflict, mortality, loss, historical trauma, including common subjects like music, food, and minutely observed individual objects brings the collection to life. It brims with entertaining linguistic twists like referring to an artichoke as ‘armed to the teeth’ or ‘gleaming like a hand grenade’ in ‘Ode to the Artichoke’ (Pablo Neruda).
The collection, filled with fun and agile wordplay, also includes an abundance of lyrical beauty, excellent metaphors and moments expressing disapproval – for instance over Putin’s war in Ukraine. Its villanelle ‘At the Grave of Chang and Eng’ presents this aptly with the metaphor ‘one of its young / ticking like a watch / from a pocket of its waistcoat’ in ‘Opossum’.
Interests are further kindled by a playful aspect: the noticeable recalling of other poems within Muldoon’s own. This is apparent in ‘By The Time You Read This’ which seems to hark back to Muldoon’s ‘Why Brownlee Left’ and the tradition of poems disguised as notes to a reader, ‘This Is Just to Say’ (William Carlos Williams) being a famed example. As expected, this allusion-packed book delivers a wide-ranging reference, transporting readers on a carousel ride across periods, landmark poems, and topics, all showcased with Muldoon’s distinctive vibrancy, vigour, and dexterity.
Rory Waterman’s latest collection of poetry, Come Here To This Gate (Carcanet, £11.99), offers a compelling narrative around an uncommon subject: his father’s struggle and eventual passing from alcoholic dementia. Written with a blend of honesty, wit, compassion, and irritation, the poems fail to shy away from any aspect of the situation. The deceased, Andrew Waterman, a fellow poet from Carcanet and an English teacher at the University of Ulster, Coleraine for thirty years before his death in 2022, enhances the reflective mood.
Waterman’s composition oscillates between a personal confession and an unabridged jury testimony, employing colloquial verbiage and rhyming verses that vary between being profound and artfully contrived. The tone alters emotionally, ranging from sympathy to sharp criticism and remorse, encapsulated in the concluding part of Home:
Monitoring the contours of your brow, I reach to touch my own,
longing for an instinctive response or connection that doesn’t arrive
until a breathless nurse appears at the door,
alerting us sweetly that our time is barely five minutes more.
The anthology’s title is derived from a line in Ronald Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate, where he states “Mr Gorbachev, approach this gate”, and the book deeply internalises the notions of borders and boundaries, exploring ways they can be manipulated, questioned, or incorporated. The start of the second portion relays “Ciaran Doyle, encaged within his estate, launches fragments of brick at the Brits in armoured automobiles”, among other delineations both tangible and metaphorical (the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea; the socioeconomic divide; the line between victims and culprits), giving critical examination to portray an alternate view of England, with its strain on health and sound relationships, its “wasted, labelled lands surrounding our existences” (ICN TO LHR). While it could be entirely grim and draining, the framework of the language and imaginative buzz make sure it’s not.
In Katie Donovan’s May Swim (Bloodaxe, £12), there exists a dynamic tension between enduring a loss and the prospect of recovery. Poems describing the aftermath of suffering contrast with those telling of small yet powerful acts of restoration. Take the poem Foxed, where a scraggy fox appears in the garden, the poem’s speaker forcefully asserts:
I’m done
with seeing death prevail:
I accepted the gauntlet.
I lured him back.
Other beings have the same experience – a drenched bee, a drooping kitten, a trapped fly – the sincere rescue efforts underline the vulnerability of our environment and our duty to preserve it. These poems stress that being alive signifies nurturing, no matter how insignificant or seemingly futile, the importance of maintaining something fundamentally human and at least an attempt to assist.
On the other hand, a series of poems about the unraveling and demise of the poet’s mother underscores the overpowering certainty of life – the unalterable nature of death regardless of sugar drips or acts of kindness. The most poignant in the compilation, resonating with Louise Glück’s lyric precision (My mother continues to be deceased – Signs), these poems employ restrained, even austere, language to relay emotional significance. Extracted from First Aid:
It’s a Friday dawn,
she had just
ingested some Scrambled egg,
in her bed, claimed she felt
slightly better,
ready to rise.
Following, we heard the tumble.
In a different place, the vernacular employs brightly original terms (“I take a figary”; “my daughters hold the reins”; “what I received was a smack in the face”) as a means of communicating about shared experiences of societal happenings and headline news. This includes poems on the acquisition of an eco-friendly automobile, visiting her offspring at an Irish-language college, and the flood of overseas females returning Home to Vote.
These vivid, bountiful and straightforward poems strike the right balance between warm affection and championing causes; they meet resignation with admirable determination.
Exploring liminal spaces and conditions of trans existence, Harry Josephine Giles’s Them (Picador, £10.99) encapsulates this element of transition in their writings.
Throughout a trilogy of consecutive insights (two titled The New Woman; the third, The New Girl), a poem experiments with alternatives through erasure, line cancellations and novel typography, eventually committing to a specific form and language. This goes beyond mere editing of a final draft—it revolves around mindful curation and intentional decisions relevant to the key enquiry of the anthology into how individual identities and bodies, and self-awareness ought to be encapsulated and performed.
This query comes to the fore in numerous poems, including ‘May a Transsexual Hear a Bird?’:
When I, a transsexual, hear a bird,
I am a transsexual hearing a bird;
when you hear a bird, you are
a person hearing a bird. Namely,
I am particular, you are general.
Syncing with the physical embodiment of identity, these poems are presented in an unconventional visual way, incorporating photographs, a flow diagram, playful footnotes, and clever formation of shape into concrete poetry. Some poems seem to resist being read and need to be interpreted as one might a non-representational painting or collage. The anthology is notably rich in references, drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as Gender Reassignment Protocol, Wikipedia, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, and a pack of oestrogen.
It’s an intricate collection – ingenious, prickly and overflowing with vibrant vigour. When ‘Elegy’, penned for Brianna Ghey, questions “How dare a poem exist?… / I resort to language to render your bereavement less / than inexpressible”, we are reminded that these poems, regardless of their whimsical or visually merry nature, are intrinsically dedicated to pondering how poetry can provide solace and its fundamental purpose.