I was slow off the mark this month, but finally managed to finish a first batch of review copies. The rest from January will be coming up soon.

Birds link the first and second poetry collections below, and the trans experience the second and third. Other themes include chronic illness, miscarriage, motherhood, history, prayer and praise.

Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett

What an evocative title – reminiscent of last year’s You Bury the Birds in My Pelvis by Kelly Weber – and powerful image of how nature has bolstered the author through chronic illness.

The title phrase comes from the poem “Trepanning,” which imagines different species keeping him company in pain. If they’re sometimes held figuratively responsible, they’re also part of the solution; openness to experience means vulnerability, but also solidarity:

a woodpecker bored my skull

in trepanation

drummed a hole and wasps flew out

goldcrests’ needle-calls put punctures

all along the kidney’s line

swallow’s flightlines skywrote my ill

when thrushes sang it out loud

I appreciated the alliteration, the out-of-the-ordinary verbs, and the everyday metaphors. When spring finds Barnett unable to go further than his garden, the birds come to him, inviting him into “a prosecco world, still all winter / stirred in March, shaken in April”. There is highly visual and aural language throughout the book. In “Unsprung,” a dead heron becomes, in an echo of T.S. Eliot, the “still point at the centre of a wheeling world”. Though a pretty niche collection, it’s a lovely little one that nature-lovers should take a chance on.

With thanks to Arachne Press for the free copy for review.

Carcanet have set the bar high for 2024 poetry with these next two releases:

Egg/Shell by Victoria Kennefick

I was blown away by Kennefick’s 2021 debut, Eat or We Both Starve, which I described as “audacious,” “fleshly,” and “pleasingly morbid.” Her sophomore collection is just as strong, with motherhood and the body continuing as overarching themes. The speaker is, by turns, pregnant and mother to a daughter. She experiences multiple miscarriages and names her lost children after plants. Becoming a mother is a metamorphosis all its own (see my recent post on matrescence), while the second long section is about her husband transitioning. This is not actually the first book I’ve read about the changes in a marriage precipitated by a spouse transitioning, and the welter of emotions that it provokes; there’s also Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley in memoir and Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins in poetry.

As in Barnett’s collection, bird metaphors are inescapable. “The Wild Swans at the Wetland Centre” must be a nod to W.B. Yeats (his were at Coole). Here, the recurring chickens and swans are the poet’s familiars, and their eggs her totems – ideal vessels, but so easily broken. The same is true of “Cup,” whose lines form the shape of a teacup perched on a saucer. The structure varies throughout: columns, stanzas; a list, a recipe. Amid the sadness, there is a lot of self-deprecation and dark humour in the poem titles (“Victoria Re-Enacts the Stations of the Cross,” falling and spilling coffee all over herself) and one-line poems that act as rejoinders. (“Orientation: A Tragedy” reads “I am so straight I give myself paper cuts.”)

If you’re wondering how life can be captured in achingly beautiful poetry, look no further. I doubt I’ll come across a better collection this year.

More favourite lines:

I get sad as earth becomes sea. I get sad

that in showing you this sinking world

I teach you how to say goodbye.

(from “On Being Two in the Anthropocene”)

I want people

to know me, and to hide.

(from “Le Cygne, My Spirit Animal”)

I want to write down the names of all my dead relatives.

How are they not here anymore? How are yours absent too?

What do we do with them, their names? Is there a box for grief?

(from “Census Night Poem”)

With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review. Coming out on 29 February.

Eleanor Among the Saints by Rachel Mann

This is Mann’s second collection, after A Kingdom of Love. In reviewing that book I remarked on the psalm-like cadence, the anatomical and allusive language, and the contrast of past and present. All are elements here as well. The first long section was inspired by Eleanor/John Rykener, a 14th-century seamstress and sex worker whom some have claimed as a trans pioneer. Little is known about her life or self-identification, so Mann does not attempt biography here, but rather is thinking alongside the character. “Construct me weird and kind, leave it to me / To strip off when I’m ready. I shall run wild, / Naked as I dare, out into sober streets.”

Three later poems share the title “A Charm to Change Sex,” each numbered and in two columns – you have a choice of whether to read them across or down the page. Either way, they land somewhere between a spell and a prayer (and there are many other prayers in the table of contents): “Hidden: transfix / Invisible made visible … oh so holy, words lead everywhere / inside become out”. Bodies are as provisional as speech (“All text is stitched, / Body too only subset of making, a stored magic”), and inescapably frail, as evidenced by a father’s illness and death, the subject of several poems.

Repetition and wordplay (“razed/raised”) sometimes tail off into faltering phrases – “#TDOR” is most notable for this. And “Seven Proof Texts on a Transitioned Body” is, by itself, worth buying the book for, with alliteration and slang pushing back at medical and scriptural vocabulary. Mann is an incredibly versatile writer: I’ve read a memoir, a work of literary appreciation, and an academic thriller by her as well as her published poetry. And while I found less that resonated in this collection, I still admired its rigorous engagement with history, theology, and the facts of a life.

With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free copy for review.