The best recent poetry – poetry review

Mouth by Mona Arshi; The Anchorage by Bernard O’Donoghue; Guaracara by Fawzia Muradali Kane; Bunting’s Honey by Moya Cannon; Old World by Robert Crawford; Joy Is My Middle Name by Sasha Debevec-McKenneyMouth by Mona Arshi (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)We open with Mouthed, a hideous image of forced speech in which a tongue is bitten out, a head hacked off. The stakes for language here – who is allowed to bear witness, and who is not – are high. The book’s opening section also includes scenes of near drowning, parental bullying, breakages, loss and childish torturing of animals. Only gradually do we realise we’re being prepared for the second section, Palace, in which Antigone mourns the death of her brother; as the poet mourns the brother who is her book’s dedicatee. This vivid collection forces us to witness the violence inherent in grief. Mourning may be socially inconvenient; Mouth opens up some of the space it needs. But by the end of the book, set at Cley nature reserve, bereavement has been neither resolved nor made tenable.The Anchorage by Bernard O’Donoghue (Faber, £12.99) These masterly portraits of rural Irish farming life, and of community life in Oxford, explore place, time and belonging; they are full of human feeling, yet never sentimental. Walking the Land tells how the family farm was sold off, “that cold March of 1962”, and lovingly lists old field names that mean nothing to the “shrewd and thoughtful men” lining up to buy it. In the title poem’s study in neighbourliness, “all the farmers in the parish” rally round to replace a year’s hay harvest lost in a barn fire. Such interconnected kindness matters, O’Donoghue shows us, yet cannot “repair the loss” of the chained dog burned along with the barn. A collection valedictory in tone and full of dedications, homages and memories reminds us that, after the craic is over, we will all be “free to pack up and make for home”. Continue reading...

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