All caught up on March releases now. There’s a lot of nature and environmental awareness in these four poetry collections, but also pandemic lockdown experiences, folklore, travel, and an impasse over whether to have children. Three are from Carcanet Press, my UK poetry mainstay; one was my introduction to Madville Publishing (based in Lake Dallas, Texas). After my thoughts, I’ll give one sample poem from each book.

The Silence by Gillian Clarke

Clarke was the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. I ‘discovered’ her just last year through Making the Beds for the Dead, which shares with this eleventh collection a plague theme: there, the UK’s foot and mouth disease outbreak of 2001; here, Covid-19. Forced into stillness and attention to the wonders near home, the poet tracks nature through the seasons and hymns trees, sunsets and birds. Many poems are titled after months or calendar points such as Midsummer and Christmas Eve. She also commemorates Welsh landmarks and remembers her mother, a nurse.

The verse is full of colours and names of flora:

May-gold’s gone to seed, yellows fallen –

primrose, laburnum, Welsh poppy.

June is rose, magenta, purple,

pink clematis, mopheads of chives,

cranesbill flowering where it will,

a migration of foxgloves crossing the field.

(from “Late June”)

Even as she revels in beauty, though, she bears in mind suffering elsewhere:

There is time and silence

to tell the names of the dying, the dead,

under empty skies unscarred

by transatlantic planes.

(from “Spring Equinox, 2020”)

I noted alliteration (“At the tip of every twig, / a water-bead with the world in it”) and end rhymes (“After long isolation, in times like these, / in the world’s darkness, let us love like trees.”). All told, I found this collection lovely but samey and lacking bite. But Clarke is in her late eighties and has a large back catalogue for me to explore.

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

Baby Schema by Isabel Galleymore

I knew Galleymore’s name from her appearance at the New Networks for Nature conference in 2018. The University of Birmingham lecturer’s second collection is a slant-wise look at environmental crisis and an impending decision about motherhood. The title comes from Konrad Lorenz’s identification of features that invite nurture. Galleymore edges towards the satirical fantasies of Caroline Bird or Patricia Lockwood as she imagines alternative scenarios of caregiving and contrasts sentimentality with indifference.

What is worthy of maternal concern? There are poems about a houseplant, a childhood doll, a soft toy glimpsed through a car window. A research visit to Disneyland Paris in the centenary year of the Walt Disney Company leads to marvelling at the surreality of consumerism. Does cuteness merit survival?

Because rhinos haven’t adopted the small

muscle responsible for puppy dog eyes,

the species goes bankrupt.

Its regional stores close down.

(from “The Pitch”)

The speaker acknowledges how gooey she goes over dogs (“Morning”) and kittens (“So Adorable”). But “Mothers” and “Chosen” voice ambivalence or even suspicion about offspring, and “Fable” spins a mild nightmare of infants taking over (“babies nesting in other babies / of cliff and reef and briar”). By the time, in “More and More,” she pictures a son, “a sticky-fingered, pint-sized / version of myself toddling through the aisles,” she concludes that we live in a depleted “world better off without him.”

Extinction and eco-grief on the one hand, yes, but the implacability of biological cycles on the other:

That night, when I got home, I learnt

a tree frog species had been lost

and my body was releasing its usual sum of blood.

I only had a few years left, my mother

often warned

(from “Release”)

Sardonic yet humane, and reassuringly indecisive, this is a poetry highlight of the year so far for me. I’ll go back and find her debut, Significant Other, too.

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

The Iron Bridge by Rebecca Hurst

Manchester-based Hurst’s debut full-length collection struck me first for its gorgeous nature poetry arising from a series of walks. Most of these are set in Southern England in the current century, but date and location stamps widen the view as far as 1976 in the one case and Massachusetts in the other. The second section entices with its titles drawn from folklore and mythology: “How the Fox Lost His Brush,” “The Animal Bridegroom,” “The Needle Prince,” “And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur.”

An unexpected favourite, for its alliteration, assonance and book metaphors in the first stanza, was “Cabbage”:

Slung from a trug it rumbles across

the kitchen table, this flabby magenta fist

of stalk and leaf, this bundle of pages

flopping loose from their binding

this globe cleaved with a grunt leaning hard

on the blade

Part III, “Night Journeys,” has more nature verse and introduces a fascination with Russia that continues through the rest of the book. I loved the mischievous quartet of “Field Notes” prose poems about “The careless lover,” “The theatrical lover,” “The corresponding lover,” and “The satisfying lover” – three of them male and one female. The final section, “An Explorer’s Handbook,” includes found poems adapted from the published work of travel writers contemporary (Christina Dodwell) and Victorian (nurse Kate Marsden). Another series, “The Emotional Lives of Soviet Objects,” gives surprising power to a doily, a slipper and a potato peeler.

There’s a huge range of form and subject matter here, but the language is unfailingly stunning. Another standout from 2024 and a poet to watch. From my other Carcanet reading, I’d liken this most to work by Laura Scott and Helen Tookey.

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

The Intimacy of Spoons by Jim Minick

A new publisher and author for me. Minick has also published fiction and nonfiction; this is his third poetry collection. Between the opener, “To Spoon,” and the title piece that closes the book, there are five more spoon-themed poems that create a pleasing thematic throughline. Why spoons? Unlike potentially violent knives and forks, which cut and spear, spoons are gentle. They’re also reflective surfaces, and because of their concavity, they can hold things and nestle together. In “The Oldest Spoon,” they even bring to mind a guiding constellation.

The rest of the book is full of North American woodland and coastal scenes and wildlife. Minick displays genuine affection for and familiarity with birds. He is also realistic in noting all that is lost with habitat destruction and dwindling populations. “Lasts” describes the bittersweet sensation of loving what is disappearing: “Goodbye, we always say too late, / or we never get a chance to say at all.” He wrestles with human mortality, too, through elegies and minor concerns about his own ageing body. I loved the seasonal imagery and alliteration in “Spangled” and the Rolling Stones refrain to “Gas,” about boat-tailed grackles encountered in the parking lot at a Georgia truck stop.

Why not embrace all that is ugly

& holy & here—the grackle’s song

that isn’t a song, a breadcrumb dropped,

the shiny ribbon of gasoline

that will get me closer to home.

For something a bit different, I appreciated the true-crime monologue of “Tim Slack, the Fix-It Man.” With playfulness and variety, Minick gives us new views on the everyday – which is exactly why it is worth reading poetry.

With thanks to Madville Publishing for the free e-copy for review.