The best recent poetry – review roundup

So Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin; Thrums by Thomas A Clark; Sculling by Sophie Dumont; Magadh by Shrikant VermaSo Far So Good by Ursula K Le Guin (Spiral House, £13.99)The title of this final book, sent to her publisher in January 2018, a week before she died, might look ironic, but with a writer like Le Guin you can’t be too sure. Her science fiction is full of journeys to different worlds, and many of these poems reference journeys too, both in this world and into the next. After the Death of Orpheus imagines Orpheus, after being torn apart by the Maenads, casually making his way down the track to the underworld, where he sees a slight figure waiting for him, Euridice. Other poems are more earthly, focusing on cattle, birds, a mouse killed by her cat, but even this smallest of creatures, as it’s carried to the trash, is given a soul by Le Guin. Cows calling for their calves from the train that takes them to the abattoir are “your sisters”. Landscapes are here too, sometimes under threat, sometimes evoked with beautiful simplicity, as in Autumn: “gold of amber / red of ember / brown of umber / all September”. Images of death in nature inevitably lead back to age and mortality, sometimes accepted as part of the natural process, elsewhere angrily resented, as in the poem about the death of Le Guin’s mother Theodora. Yet it is her own impending death which increasingly takes centre stage in the closing meditations on “extreme age”, hope mingling with despair as the body declines, approaching the end where “the wire / gets higher / and they forget / the net”.Thrums by Thomas A Clark (Carcanet, £12.99)A nature poet of minimalist tendencies, Clark’s career spans more than 50 years; during that time he has developed a style that by stripping away some of the hallmarks of the lyric – the personal voice, the argument, the rhyme – returns poetry to a purity of perception that gives us not poems about nature, but nature itself. The poet, all but absent, is like a sounding board for his environment, and he reports back to us about his encounters: “be one who / when the lightest breeze / thrills through you / takes note”. There is no moulding of the material into a personal experience here, there is no epiphany, rather the body becomes a vehicle for absorbing its surroundings, and as it leans into the rain, the self dissolves into the landscape: “a part of you on the rocks / a part of you in bog cotton / a part of you snagged on wire / a part of you unravelling”. Glimpses of gossamer, willowherb, deer, and owls are delicately interlaced with the language of music – the thrums of the title – which lulls us into a state of unfolding perception, caught in the moment before it is processed by thought. The poems figure environmental damage as well as beauty: “who cares for the dune gentian / who cares for the barn owl / who who who”. Yet by metamorphosing the repeated question “who cares?” into the cry of the barn owl – “who who who” – Clark shows us that by identifying with nature, of which we are always already a part, we might find a way. Continue reading...

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