The 11 best poetry books of 2023 so far

November: I Think We’re Alone Now by Abigail Parry

Destined, perhaps, to be forever known as the poet who makes toys – she used to work for a circus, crafting Hula-Hoops, devil sticks and all sorts of other fun things – ­Abigail Parry’s second collection ­considerably extends the range and depth of her much acclaimed first collection, Jinx (2018).

There are fewer high jinks – less self-conscious technical virtuosity – on display in this new book, but many more moody low lights. The tone is darker and more intimate: a poet’s second collection may have more to prove, but there’s often less to declare. The claim has already been made – now comes the proof and the proving. This is when things start to get serious.

Ish. I Think We’re Alone Now takes both its magnificent title and its jaunty sonnet-like title poem from the song first released by Tommy James and the Shondells in 1967, but which is doubtless more familiar to readers of this paper from the poptastic cover version by Tiffany in 1987. (Parry’s range of ­reference in this book, as previously, is extraordinarily wide and, if ­anything, growing wider, extending from pop and rock, including Pulp and Radiohead, to C S Lewis, Rilke and Richard Rorty.) 

The poem, like the song, is an absolute blast, and lays bare one of Parry’s trademark procedures. There is the casual acknowledgement of the poem’s construction (“It’s stuck in there, the thought”) followed by a fleeting memory or, in this case, a snatch of lyric ­(“Running just as fast we can”), combined with frank details of some personal encounter and hints of sexual desire (“the loop where you and I play out / those stubborn gestures on repeat”). It’s an oft-repeated and winning ­formula by a poet who manages to combine both sleight-of-hand and heart-on-sleeve.

Written in loosely rhyming couplets in ­iambic pentameter, “Audio ­Commentary” is one of the longest poems in the book, one of several bravura ­performances, creepily ­narrated by a filmmaker watching a movie whose female lead has now told the truth about the exploitation she faced as a young starlet: “I don’t think ­people realise / how young she was. Younger than her years, / as people say.” It takes, he says, “a kind of guilelessness to make / a shot like that come off, a certain lack / of worldly scuff and wear.” It’s a ­brilliant piece of ­ventriloquism, coolly capturing a male gaze on MeToo.

Elsewhere, complex and ­conflicting desires are not merely acknowledged but celebrated, as in “Intentional Complications”, which recalls the early work of Fiona ­Pitt-Kethley: “I know a thing or two about control / and how to lose it – / a little weed, a lot of wine, / untied my tongue enough to tell it straight – / that yes, I wanted this.” It’s a poem about knots and knotting, of various kinds.

There are a few poems that are rather more obvious and lacking in surprise. “Muse”, for example, begins, unsurprisingly, “I met her once. In taffeta and ermine, / and sitting in a bar in Stepney Green.” And the way in which the poems’ titles often bleed into the first lines occasionally creates an effect of blurring that seems not always clear in purpose, though the ­fantastically rhyming poem titled “The brain of the rat in stereotaxic space” continues “is all laid out on numbered plates”, which certainly works, with the poem laying itself out plainly on numbered plates, as it were.

But one can always quibble and haver. What makes this collection thrilling is Parry’s relentless and immense curiosity, often signalled by her breaking into asides and parentheses. “Only later on are we through a glass / and darkly. (An odd phrase, that – / a pane of sullen blue behind each eye. / You don’t look through a mirror.)” Memories continually pop and fizz and bubble up. The drifting dream logic of “In the dream of the cold restaurant”, for example, is interrupted by a memory of “a carpet / not unlike this carpet here, lalling its beige / hoops and braids around the table’s feet.” That little “lalling” there is brilliant, perfect. (I had to look it up.)

For all its involutions – “each mental irk and imp”, as Parry puts it in “English-speaking learners” – and for all its allusiveness and its continual sidelong glances, I Think We’re Alone Now is entirely companionable.

Ian Sansom is the author of September 1 1939: A Biography of a Poem. I Think We’re Alone Now is published by Bloodaxe at £12. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

• Read The Telegraph’s Poem of the Week column every week in our Culture Newsletter. Recent weeks have featured poetry by Ishion Hutchinson, Anne Carson and Victoria Adukwei Bulley. Sign up at telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter

October: The Letters of Seamus Heaney, ed Christopher Reid

Sometimes the good guys win. During his lifetime, Seamus Heaney was garlanded with every accolade. including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. And rightly so: he was, by any measure, a great poet. As this selection of his letters now shows, he was also a lovely man.

Commissioned by Heaney’s family and judiciously selected by fellow poet and editor Christopher Reid, The Letters of Seamus Heaney will be a boon to scholars and general readers, but not much good for muckrakers, snarks or anyone looking for signs of torment. This is very much the public private Heaney. There are no great revelations, no real secrets shared. There are no letters to family. “From the start,” explains Reid in his introduction, “it was made clear to me that their privacy… was to be inviolable, and I have had no difficulty in respecting their wish.”

“Respect” is the right word in relation to Heaney: he respected his own gifts, his audiences, his correspondents and his own privacy. The letters are accordingly respectful: spontaneous and vivid, but also polite and careful. As Reid explains, if his selection of letters has a theme, “it is Heaney’s obligation to duty”.

Born to a farming family in Co Londonderry in 1939, Heaney’s first major collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published by Faber in 1966: he received the first copies of the book on the same day he was appointed to a lectureship at Queen’s University, Belfast. From there, his career took off. His success in large part owed to his capacity for sheer hard work and the support of his wife Marie, about whom he writes affectionately. What the letters reveal is the amount of low-level hack-work – book-reviews, endless committees – that writers have to undertake to make ends meet, even for someone possessed of Heaney’s extraordinary gifts. “At my back, I always hear the Bank of Ireland hurrying near.”

There are lots of knockabout letters here to friends and scholars and fellow poets, as well as many fond missives to Charles Monteith, Heaney’s editor at Faber and perhaps the most important figure in helping to establish his career. As he becomes more and more famous – “famous Seamus” – there are occasional hints of irritation and discomfort. Writing an otherwise pleasant letter to the scholar Michael Parker on July 12 1988, Heaney notes that “the data you collected so impressively is actually part of the lining of my memory”, and he warns Parker against publishing photographs or maps relating to his work: “It would be a robbery and I would have the cruel knowledge that I had led the robber to the hidden treasure and even explicated its value.”

The poet John Montague is at one point described as “tedious”, and Heaney grumbles a little to one friend about all the stuff he gets sent in the post: “The querulous self-salving rhetorics of the million books of useless poetry. The requests for blurbs.” But whenever there’s some problem or awkwardness – as there is with the critic John Carey, for example, over an unfriendly review of Heaney’s friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon – it is Heaney, characteristically, who seeks to find common ground and a middle way.

For the general reader, what’s perhaps most interesting here are all the little human touches: Heaney asking a friend to send him a print of the footballer George Best; his account of buying a dresser and an old scrubbed table; and chilling out with the poet Derek Walcott, drinking rum punch in St Lucia. 

For scholars and historians of Irish literature, meanwhile, there are half a dozen truly important letters, which help to explain and illuminate the work. An account of why he left Belfast with his family in 1972, written to John McGahern in May 1975: 

Partly I wanted to be rid of the enervating social footwork entailed in the role of papist-writer-makes-good-and-in-danger-of-co-option-by-Unionist establishment; partly I felt I was never going to encounter my shallownesses and small possibilities if I stayed swathed in Queen’s and the swaddling bands of the ‘Belfast literary scene’; partly I enjoyed the grandeur of walking out.

In October 1973 he writes to Charles Monteith: “I got back on Friday and came gradually to domestic earth after a boggy high in Jutland. I think more and more that I’d like to do a book on the bog – Irish bog with salutations to Jutland.” Whence came his best early collection, North (1975), with its poems about ancient bodies preserved in the bog.

What’s truly remarkable is that wherever he went, Heaney seemed to excite tremendous kindness and generosity in others: offers of houses, jobs, etc. He seems to have been the kind of person that other people wanted to assist. At one point he has no fewer than three job offers on the table, from Princeton, Columbia and Ann Arbor – though Harvard eventually wins through with the offer of a temporary lecturing job and by 1979, as Reid notes, Heaney became fixed “in the role of travelling, lecturing, poetry-reciting and pomp-attending public figure”.

He bore the role and responsibility with tremendous grace. “Over the years I’ve been blessed with much welcome for my work”, he admits. How best to respond to such welcome? He doesn’t take it too seriously: the Nobel is “the Sweden-swank”, all the personal and critical attention is just so much “Heaneybop”. He never boasts or crows, allowing himself only a wry remark, when he is elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1989, that it’s “a case of Irish dog wins English race”.

Heaney’s most famous note – the final inclusion in this selection – was not a letter but a text message to his wife, in Latin, on 30 August 2013, as he was being taken to the operating theatre in Blackrock Clinic for an emergency procedure on a ruptured artery – “Noli timere”: “Don’t be afraid.” He died as he lived: encouraging others.

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid, is published by Faber at £40. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

September: The Iliad by Homer, tr Emily Wilson

Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying, and presumably reading, new translations of the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscences of Bronze Age combat? Some years ago, I asked the same question at the start of a lengthy article on the composition and editing of the Greek text in Alexandria’s great library, which I cheekily titled ‘Homer Inc’.

I never did answer the question, because at the time, I was in Beijing, where the fourth edition of the Iliad rendered in Chinese characters was selling well at the big Wangfujing bookshop. That brought me to the belated realisation that only a blockhead would pass up the opportunity to read the Iliad again with the excuse of a new translation. My own Greek gives me Prokopios transparently, but only a dull sense of Homer’s Ionian-inflected musicality – which is rather odd, actually, because Prokopios, like every other non-illiterate in the eastern Empire, had been brought up on Homer in his schooldays. 

(Parenthetically, it also occurred to me that if the Iliad was selling well in China, it was not as entirely a Eurocentric affectation as influential academics were suggesting at the time, which was enough to induce the shrinkage or outright closure of classics departments. Princeton’s, mysteriously, is still open even after abandoning the Greek or Latin language requirement – it used to be both – in the name, of course, of inclusion.)

There are widely admired Iliad translations that I dislike, including Robert Fitzgerald’s for betraying the Greek text even as he paraded a semblance of authenticity with his “Akhilleus” instead of Achilles (and so on). But I have not disliked reading Emily Wilson’s. A key reason is her solution for the notorious problem of Homer’s dactylic hexameters, which are good for chanting to a lyre in Greek, but do not declaim at all well in English – and an Englished Iliad must of course be declaimed.

Wilson tells us that she (very sensibly) prayed for the help of Calliope, the muse in charge of epics, who (very sensibly) told her to find her meter in the English poetry she liked best. If the reader therefore hears Milton’s unrhymed iambic pentameters in Wilson’s Iliad, that’s just as well, because no English text is better declaimed than Paradise Lost, and Milton read his Homer most intensively, judging by his own heavily annotated Iliad.

Wilson could not have favourites among the books – it was the editors of the great library of Alexandria who divided both Iliad and Odyssey into 24 books – but because my own war experiences were in raids rather than battles, I have always particularly liked book 10, titled Espionage by Night by Wilson. Many others have particularly disliked it: one Stephen Mitchell excluded the book altogether from his translation because of its cruelty, he wrote, and the old contention that it was somehow less authentic.

I, on the other hand, would hold that it is the most authentic of all books, because it features a boar’s head helmet that was archaic even then. Wilson begins:

The finest fighters from the whole of Greece
slept through the night beside the ships. Soft Sleep 
bound all of them – except Lord Agamemnon, 
the son of Atreus, the people’s shepherd. 
Sleep sweetness could not hold him while his mind
was troubled by so many cares and worries…
His inmost spirit trembled. Every time 
he gazed towards the Trojan plain, he marvelled 
at all the fires that burned in front of Troy…

Here is Agamemnon showing why he deserved to be the commanding officer in spite of all the insults directed at him: awake while all others sleep, just like a modern brigade commander in war, because he is troubled by the fires – which are in the wrong place, “in front of Troy” instead of inside its mighty walls.

Why? To find out, he sends Odysseus and Diomedes to sneak towards Troy in the night, but they have not ventured far when they capture rich-boy Dolon, who tells them everything when promised his life: so many allies have arrived to help Troy that there’s no room for them inside. The most formidable new force is the Thracian cavalry that the ship-borne Greeks cannot possibly match, a most dangerous threat that the two heroes nullify by stampeding the horses all the way to the Greek ships, after violating their promise by killing Dolon.

Yes, cruel and dishonourable, but realistic: a pair of infiltrators cannot take a POW with them, nor safely release him. There, as everywhere in the Iliad, Homer’s glorification of violence is paired with empathy for the suffering victims at the receiving end of glorious combat, and notoriously he follows the spear all the way in as it cleaves flesh.

The only false note in Wilson’s edition occurs in her Introduction, where she unaccountably finds it necessary to complain about enslavement and rape in ancient wars, activities deemed natural long after the Iliad was composed. Moreover, her complaint is especially inappropriate in this case, because Agamemnon swore that he had never violated the priest’s daughter he had so unfortunately captured, while Achilles swears that he loves his captive Briseis very deeply, as much as any beloved wife, even though he had won her with his spear.

I find it charming that Wilson is so smitten with the greatest work of Western literature that she refuses to go out of her way to deny its historicity; indeed, she identifies Troy with the Wilusa of the Hittites – the name occurs in cuneiform correspondence deciphered with an unpardonable delay – plainly derived from the Iliad’s Ilion. She even provides maps. For my part, I am tempted to replace my Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers 1883 prose Iliad with Wilson’s poetical one: it is that accurate. ENL

Edward N Luttwak, author of The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, is a strategic adviser to the US government. The Iliad, tr Emily Wilson, is published by Norton at £30. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

August: From Our Own Fire by William Letford

A godlike Artificial Intelligence becomes sentient, secretly escapes the firewall built to contain it, then alerts humanity to its existence. How does Scotland respond? By naming it “Andy”. As in Andy Dufresne – “because,” as From Our Own Fire’s narrator explains, “the sneaky wee radge went full Shawshank.” What else, from the country that once christened a polar cyclone Hurricane Bawbag?

Until two years ago, my Scottish Sci-Fi Verse Novels shelf was empty. Yours probably was as well. Then The Martian’s Regress by JO Morgan was shortlisted for the 2021 TS Eliot Prize, and Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles won 2022’s Arthur C Clarke Award. William Letford’s third collection is a bright new light in this unlikely constellation: it’s by turns warm and chilling, earthy and lyrical, with a canny sense of what people are actually like. Adapt it for TV, and it could be bigger than The Last of Us.

Andy’s jailbreak sets off a chain of events which, by the start of the book, has already ended civilisation as we know it (though it’s a while before the reader learns exactly what has happened). The AI intercepted a message from “a wee mad alien probe”, and struggled to translate it; in a line that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, it gave three words to explain what the message was: a gift, a song, and a weapon. Once translated, and broadcast across the world, those who heard it became something no longer human. The song is infectious, and spreads through empathy – a wicked, original idea.

From Our Own Fire is written as the journal of one Joe Macallum, on the run from empathy-zombies. His prose diary entries fill every left-hand page, with free-verse poems on the right, either reflecting on events or advancing the plot. Read as self-contained poems, the verse sections may not all be Letford’s sharpest, but they’re not self-contained: they’re part of the narrative, and utterly credible as Joe’s own jotted-down lines.

When we meet Joe, he’s hiking to a remote Forest Garden Project – in reality, there are already several of these eco-friendly “edible gardens” across the UK – where he plans to build a new life with his extended family, who are all travelling with him. Close-knit, hard as nails, they’re the sort you’d want on your side in an apocalpyse. There’s Aunty Mary, “mid-fifties and built like a berserker”, the kind of woman you’d “let loose at the night / and the darkness / would take a step backwards”. There’s Uncle Jimmy, who spent the 1980s touring with a “a punk folk fusion band”, and is now “a fully-fledged member of the crazy eyes brigade, a proficient plumber, and a very efficient cocaine dealer”. And there are seven more, including in-law Jason, a reservoir of knowledge about agriculture, who’s kind and patient and spiritually enlightened, and naturally drives Joe up the wall: “The way he listens / makes me angry.”

What they all have in common is a respect for craft. “The memory was in his hands,” Joe says, of his stonemason father. Letford wrote his first poetry collection while working as a roofer, an experience that gave him a deep sense of what it means to learn hand-to-hand, to hold knowledge in the body, not the mind. He gives that trait to his characters: 

You won’t see the best of a Macallum until you put something in their fist. Joiner, nurse, stonemason, hairdresser, plumber, gardener, the list goes on. My cousin Lorna repairs watches. That’s the quantum mechanics of manual labour.  Now the world’s broken I feel safer being surrounded by people who can put things together.

Critics have called this novel a dystopia, but Letford resists the label. He teases the idea that the song-virus has created a better world – one the Macallums reject, in their thrawn, intractable, messily human way. The book ends by contemplating Neanderthal cave-paintings, those haunting outlines of hands. Letford doesn’t spell it out, but hints that this family are to the zombies as the Neanderthals were to us. The fiery, loveable Macullums may be bound for extinction – but oh, just look at the things their hands have made. TFS

Tristram Fane Saunders’s first poetry collection is Before We Go Any Further. From Our Own Fire is published by Carcanet at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

July: The Grid by Eli Payne Mandel

Let’s say it’s 3,500 years ago, and you’re lost in a labyrinth – the Labyrinth – at the palace of Knossos on Crete. The Minotaur will find you and eat you soon, so it’s a good moment to scribble down your last will and testament. Which alphabet would you use? 

The answer is probably Linear B – a writing system scratched onto unfired clay in ancient Crete, miraculously preserved when the clay was baked in a great blaze, and only decoded in 1952. (An earlier alphabet used on the island, Linear A, remains uncracked.) The glory of that discovery went to an Englishman, Michael Ventris, who realised that the rune-like letters corresponded to sounds in an early form of Greek.

But Ventris was building on years of work by Alice Kober, an American who taught Latin at Brooklyn College by day, and apparently spent her evenings banging her head against the brick wall of this unforgiving alphabet. Eli Payne Mandel, a fellow Brooklynite, tells Kober’s story in The Grid, a book about reading the unreadable, and seeking meaning where it can’t be found.

We meet Kober in the title sequence, “The Grid”, which occupies half the book. “The Grid” is what many poets – though not Mandel – would call a “lyric essay”, an increasingly fashionable form. It’s a series of numbered paragraphs, mostly in prose, setting out facts plainly and dispassionately, with any literary flourishes or moments of heightened feeling standing out all the more sharply against that muted backdrop. 

This form recalls Anne Carson’s great lyric essay about Proust, “The Albertine Workout”. I once had a nightmare in which a heavy wooden cube arrived in the post, with a note saying it was a new Carson poem. “But it doesn’t have any words!” I wailed to the delivery-man. He just shrugged, pointing to his clipboard: “It says here, ‘poem’.” In the cold light of day, I agree: take it as a given that poetry can be anything, and press on to the specifics. “Is it poetry?” is the least interesting question we can ask about this sort of book.

“The Grid” is just the first half of The Grid. The second half comprises two shorter, looser sequences, “Screen Memory” and “Letters of Last Resort”.  The latter is, largely, a series of beautiful translations of snippets from Ovid’s late poems, written in exile. The deadpan, dreamlike prose-poems of “Screen Memory” – surreal-ish if not surrealist – reminded me of Ian Seed, and of Kafka’s short fables. 

But the same theme, the slipperiness of meaning and interpretation, runs through the entire book. “I was travelling through a particularly grim part of your country when I saw this phrase scrawled beneath an overpass,” Mandel writes in one poem in “Screen Memory”. The nonsense phrase is “GORKY SUBLIVM TIXET”, and the poet obsessively puzzles away at it, before a final sentence that arrives from nowhere: “The point is, I arrived in your town and rang your bell at the appointed time, but you did not answer, nor have I heard from you since, and all my letters have been returned sewn shut like eyelids.”

There’s the same deathly note to Mandel’s posthumous trawl through Kober’s many documents and letters. With bone-dry humour, he observes: “One of her notebooks has a page entirely blank except for the phrase: ‘Maybe due to lacunae in material.’” She was an awful typist, but he finds meaning in her typos. In a note about editing one of her papers, hoping to hide herself in her own research, she typed: “I want to oamdit the many instances of the pronoun ‘I’” – “omit” typed over “admit”. Now you see her, now you don’t.

What sort of guy would dedicate months to trawling through her papers? Well, the sort of guy who would set off on a 642-mile hike just because John Keats once did it. Footing Slow (2016), Mandel’s short book about that trek, is a mini-masterclass in self-deprecating humour. His personality leaps from the page in it, which makes the near-total suppression of his personality here rather impressive.

Kober turned herself into a kind of human computer, creating vast tables of symbols, organised by frequency. “Her thoroughness was merciless.” In her research, “she abstained to a stunning degree from favouring one fact over another. Ventris called the results ‘internal evidence dispassionately sifted’.” There’s a similar kind of sifting going on here. We’re given details, and left to join dots. 

Mendel – a classical linguist himself – includes his own translations of Horace, Pindar and others. Those translations are all light as breath. “Wisdom leads us into the maze of stories / and then robs us dumb,” Mandel writes, in his version of a Pindar ode. In capitals, he translates odd bits of Linear B. One refers to “THE KEY-BEARER”: “SHE HOLDS THE LIMITS / OF ?TWO COMMUNAL PLOTS BUT SHE DOES NOT DO WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO”. Ventris said that Kober was “purposefully stopping short” in her research: she held the key, but didn’t do what she needed to do.

Mandel, too, stops short. “The Grid” resists neat conclusions and hyperbole in a way that feels true to its subject. “Her discoveries were so few,” he writes, a painful admission. “It would be false to claim that Kober was responsible for deciphering Linear B. It would also be untrue… to assert that she has been forgotten. Her contribution was fundamental but inconspicuous. She lives on in the limbo of the half-triumphant.” TFS

The Grid is published by Carcanet at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

June: Women in Comfortable Shoes by Selima Hill

It’s hard to write about Selima Hill without looking silly. Her poems resist analysis. Short, precise and startling, funny in both senses, they make everything else look like pretentious waffle. Sure, you could compare her 21st collection Women in Comfortable Shoes with its predecessor, Men Who Feed Pigeons, and conclude (as one august journal has) that “the speaker’s entire orientation to gendered relationships fluctuates” – but you would see her poems rolling their eyes.

When Hill was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in January, Simon Armitage called her “a person and a poet who… will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones”. This is nearly true. Her work conforms ever closer to our poetic expectations of Hill; she has become her own genre.

There’s a formula. The Hill poem is odd in unfashionable ways, usually in iambic pentameter, and in crisp sentences, its vocabulary that of ordinary speech. It’s joke-shaped, but not a joke. Mental illness and trauma hover in the background. She’s playful, and revels in a well-placed apostrophe: “Just as all my boyfriends are my girlfriends’, / the letters of ungodliest spell longitudes.” 

She writes in sequences – 50 glimpses of the same character, for instance. A precis for the 30 poems of “Dolly” explains: “Dolly is a duck. The other 29 women are, in various ways, human.” Hill writes unstoppably, publishing a new pamphlet every month in 2022. “Dolly” was one; several others are included here. That profusion means she repeats herself (rabbits in one poem here “sit and smile like contented pies”; women in another “sit and smile like enormous pies”), but the miracle is that she doesn’t repeat herself more. In recent decades, the books have got longer and the poems shorter; there are more than 400 poems in this collection, many just a couple of lines long.

In different moods, Hill can sound like Edward Lear or Basho, Kafka or Stevie Smith. She’s usually called “surreal”, which is wrong. Surrealism’s food is untethered metaphor; Hill’s joined-up similes are grounded, truthful and accurate, pinning a psyche to the page in two lines. A troubled sister “stands there like an orphan with a suitcase / but without the suitcase”. Her logic may not be other peoples’ logic, but it’s intuitively right. In the first poem here, a young girl wonders about her damaged, reclusive mother: “Is she frightened? I have no idea./ Maybe she just sleeps all day like pears.”

Hill is especially good at capturing young girls’ voices, a strength of the early sequences here, in a book that charts a kind of Seven Ages of Woman: the 1950s schoolgirl in boater or beret, speaking to strangers when she mustn’t, asking awkward questions; the mid-life loss of loved ones; finding giddy and self-doubting love in later life; and old age, personified by the isolated widow, Vera, who “glares at the street, / at people getting younger and younger / and further and further away.”

Is Vera the poet? Yes and no. “I don’t approve of too much autobiography,” Hill has said, “but my only subject really is me.” So, some facts about that “me”: Hill is 77. Her parents, grandparents, ex-husband and son were (or are) all painters. She was almost killed in a fire as a child, was mute for much of her 20s, spent a year in a psychiatric hospital, and now lives “by the sea in Dorset with her dog and a bald robin” in a cabin full of mirrors, all carefully positioned so none of her reflections can catch her eye. 

She isn’t on the internet, and rarely gives interviews, but last year agreed to answer a poetry magazine’s questions by post. Her answers came handwritten, on unlined paper. A sample:

Q: “You’ve published over twenty poetry collections to date since your first came out with Chatto in 1984. That rate of production suggests that the poems come to you very fast. Do they?”

A: “Let me tell you about a recurring nightmare I have: I am at a reading or a party and open my mouth to speak. Something like a soft pink worm wiggles up my throat and across my tongue; before I can close my mouth it unspools itself out into the room, streaked with blood. It’s like spaghetti, it keeps slithering out and I realise with horror it is going to carry on until all my entrails are uncoiled and I’m turned inside out and I die!”

Compared to the hilarious Men Who Feed Pigeons, Women in Comfortable Shoes is more painful, more unsettling; still funny, but in a minor key. The late poems here answer the question Larkin asked of “Old Fools” approaching death: “Why aren’t they screaming?” Because, Hill shows us, they’re too busy “staring at the fingers they can’t use, / the useless limbs like stockings filled with arrowroot”. 

Elsewhere, a jolly-hockey-sticks tone is set ironically against existentialist darkness: “My mother, which is typical, is dead, / after all, it’s tidy to be dead”. In Swimming in the Lake, a haunting poem, the speaker’s brain is “like the brains of the dead / who see a light that reveals nothing”. If Kierkegaard wrote for Bunty, he might have produced a poem such as “Horses”, about the “unnecessary” parents of girls at a boarding school:

“Why they had children in the first place 
they can’t remember, or they never knew,
but anyhow our fathers are preoccupied, 
their houses hushed like houses made of down. 
Our mothers, with their handbags and their lipsticks, 
existent in the sense that God exists – 
benighted, incorruptible and pained – 
our mothers are pretending to be mothers 
while we ourselves pretend to be horses.”

All poets – all great poets – are slightly mad. Selima Hill is a great poet. TFS

Women in Comfortable Shoes is published by Bloodaxe at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

May: Floodmeadow by Toby Martinez de las Rivas

Toby Martinez de las Rivas is an outlier in modern British poetry. There’s a soberness and earnest religiosity not often encountered, a sense that his ambitious poems – like those of Geoffrey Hill, an undoubted touchstone – are more interested in liturgical history and the long view than the technology-laden present. They can be challenging and knotty, with their idiosyncratic layouts and their wish to be purged of corseting ironies.

As in his two previous books, Terror (2014) and Black Sun (2018), in Floodmeadow there are reflections on resurrection and crucifixion, but with a down-tuning of his old apocalyptic energies. It’s not quite restraint – Martinez de las Rivas is still a defiantly high-church style – but there’s a foregrounded sense of being lulled, somewhat willingly, into an undertow.

Some of the poems touch on brokenness: the opening poem, “The Levels/Nothing”, perhaps the finest of his career, turns to face the reader at the end: “I have written a poem for those of you/ that are empty, an end to kings & tenderness”. One can’t avoid thinking Martinez de las Rivas has particular insight into night thoughts and seemingly impossible returns, given the online furore that surrounded Black Sun; a viral review which was, in the kindest light, a grave misreading, linked its title to far-right symbology, putting the poet in what was, reputationally, a potentially ruinous position.

Martinez de las Rivas writes of a wish to “set it down, this/ gospel according to my eye”. To do this he leans on recurring scenes and images – a wooden glider flown with his father, a steel gate – which act like emblems in a private theology. The glider becomes a way of talking about freedom and nature in “The Hippenscombe Crucifixion”: “Do you remember the shadow of its wings/ rippling the earth like an archangel?” The lyric allows the poet a chance to play with time present and past. In another poem featuring a glider, he writes of “The smell of it being September, & forever”.

There are moments of grace, and beauty, in Floodmeadow, as well as the incense-laden “extravagant genuflections” one has come to expect from this singular poet. There’s also quite a bit of weird stuff in here – “torn” sheet music, distressed-looking lyrics and geometric line-drawings. More indebted to William Blake than to his contemporaries, he’s thankfully still carrying out his acts of prayerful salvage in extremis. DR

Declan Ryan’s first poetry collection is Crisis Actor. Floodmeadow is published by Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

April: To 2040 by Jorie Graham

The end is nigh, folks. We’re hurtling towards the apocalypse, as the Pulitzer-winning poet Jorie Graham has been trying to tell us for years. Now 73, Graham has always been – as a critic called her distant influence Robert Frost – a terrifying poet. Where we might see spiders, birds and laundry (the subjects of her famous early poem The Geese), Graham sees a battle between implacable forces of order and chaos.

In her last four collections – gathered in 2022 as a great brick called To [the] Last [Be] Human – that terror became increasingly topical, drawing on fears about technology, extinction and our heating planet. To 2040 is her 15th collection, and continues her apocalyptic late style (the book’s very first words are “Are we / extinct yet?”) but extends it through nightmarish visions. Graham is no longer anticipating the end: she’s showing us what comes afterwards. Some critics have pigeonholed To 2040 purely as climate-crisis poetry, but Graham is up to something richer and stranger than that.

In her imagined futures, “the new / flawless birds / wired to perfection” chirrup their extinct prototypes’ songs. Nights are obsolete, Sun and Moon replaced by monotonous light. We could be in a Samuel Beckett play. Her speakers are numbed to their new normal, sighing things like: “We were allowed to / speak then. It was permitted.” Even the atmosphere they breathe is hobbled: “air they / limped in itself / limped”. 

One poem gives a wonderfully funny-frightening conversation with a drone; another offers warped pastoral, as viewed through a VR headset. There are moments of beauty – we see a “field where the abandoned radio is crackling / at the winter-stilled waters, the winter-killed / will of God” – but that lush alliteration is uncharacteristic. It’s hard to grow the old flowers of rhetoric in this parched world, though these new, carnivorous, artificial plants have their own attractions. 

To 2040’s title poem is one of Graham’s very best, though I’m not sure I understand it. Perhaps Graham doesn’t understand it either. It’s not, as the title might suggest, addressed to future readers in 2040. It seems to be a voice from even further in the future, in a purgatorial snowbound afterlife, speaking back in time to the almost-dead of 2040, who will be offered a choice. “Don’t not ask for forgiveness […] Do not ask for youth. They will offer them up // pristine and innocent. Do not listen. Do not make the silly mistake do / not ask for eternity.” It follows its own urgent dream-logic. No poem I’ve read this year has left a more haunting impression.

In America, Graham is less an author than a monolith, dominating the literary horizon like one of those towers of rusted metal sculpted by her mother, the artist Beverley Pepper. “There is no one in the world of poetry who hasn’t read her,” a profile in New York magazine declared last month. That’s less true in Britain, where her idiosyncrasy requires introduction. Her style won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. She can be disorientating and abstract, abbreviates words inconsistently (alternating between “your” and “yr” in the same stanza, like someone texting hurriedly on an old Nokia), and plays weird games with syntax. In one poem the phrase “the thing […] grew” separates its subject from its verb by nine lines of round-the-houses subclauses. 

The poems of To 2040 are at once sprawling and pared-back; they each flow over several pages, but employ a tightly restricted vocabulary. (“Each word I use I have used before.”) Expect much repetition and self-interrogation, and countless rhetorical questions without question-marks. Her 2020 collection, Runaway, set the tone by asking: “Will it ever rain again. / What is ever. What is again.” Like any distinctive style, Graham’s lends itself to parody. (A cynic might ask: Is this all just hot air. What is air. What did it mean, to be just.) The less successful poems in To 2040 seek “the / rare ineffable / narrowness”; there’s a narrowness to their imagination, too, an unsatisfying restraint. 

Elsewhere, though, her skin-tingling direct address to the reader recalls WS Graham (no relation), whose poems liked to point out that they were just a bunch of words. “Are we there yet you ask. I do not know. I am / the poem. I am just shaking you / gently to remind you.” In these lines, Jorie Graham pulls off the impressive trick of sounding both intimate and impersonal, or rather disembodied. But the body is inescapable in a poem titled “I catch sight of the now”, a deeply moving detour into realism. Graham was diagnosed with cancer in 2021. Several poems here flicker in and out of hospital settings. (In one, she asks: “is the beautiful air // still shoving its / fistfuls / into my / lungs. In- // hale says the nurse, / holding my hand.”) In “I catch sight of the now”, the speaker – losing her hair after chemotherapy, or radiation, it’s unclear – takes a shower as her hair falls out, and grapples with “your years of having & not / knowing, still wet, in clumps, through which the daylight now is / pouring itself”.

A personal sense of imminent mortality collides with planet-wide concerns to give even the most surreal visions in To 2040 an emotional weight, and an unusual empathy. In one poem, a woodpecker drills into the poet’s chest, while “someone adjusts the pillow under my head”, and a nurse looks on. The woodpecker is a symbol for the poet’s physical pain, but it’s not just a symbol. It’s a bird, with its own thoughts and desires. “It too wants to live its brief glorious moment, / right to the end please”. For all this book’s grand apocalyptic visions, it’s that small, hopeless, human “please” that moves us most. TFS

To 2040 is published by Carcanet at £15.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

March: The Lost Book of Barkynge by Ruth Wiggins

The Venerable Bede wrote excitedly about a “libellus” (or “little book”) of Barking Abbey, relating its miracles and the extraordinary lives of its abbesses, nuns and saints. That book is long since lost. As for the abbey, its ruins lie in a small park in Essex, between an Asda and a Tesco.

But here comes another “little book”; one that revives those nuns and rebuilds Barking in the mind’s eye, brick by brick. Actually, “little” is a little misleading. Ruth Wiggins’s The Lost Book of Barkynge is a poetry collection of rare ambition and scope, as made clear from its shiver-inducing opening: “And so begins nine hundred winters.” 

Wiggins takes us all the way from the abbey’s foundation in AD666 (a hellish-sounding year of omens, sickness, “a great palsy among the geese”, etc) to its dissolution in 1539. In between, the abbey faces fire, flood, famine and plague, yet keeps finding ways to flourish. 

By the standards of the debut poet’s usual “slim vol”, this is a great cathedral of a thing, its hundred-plus pages buttressed by the architecture of serious research. We get two pages of maps, three of dramatis personae, five of bibliography, and 14 of “extensive notes that I recommend to the reader as integral to the text”, as Wiggins warns us in the introduction. The correct way to read these poems might be one at a time, making sure to eat your greens first: ie chew over the relevant endnotes (often surprisingly juicy), then return to tackle the verse once you’re certain you won’t mix up King Cnut’s two wives (both called Ælfgifu).

Or you could do what I did: binge straight through the poems, forgetting the notes exist till the end. I relished the small details – watching passing ships, as “their long beaks jostle and leer/ along the strand” – and was caught up in the characters’ Wolf Hall-ish politicking, despite frequently losing track of who was who as half-recalled names from 1066 And All That whizzed past. I’m still not wholly certain if Æthelthryth is an abbess or the sound made by a snake with a lisp.

For all its epic sweep, this is an intimate, personal book. Each poem is a dramatic monologue, with the speaker named in the title; it’s usually the abbess of the time (all drawn from historic record), but occasionally an invented figure, or a collective voice - the local washerwomen, say, or the abbey choir. The ventriloquism only falters when Wiggins tries for the ecstasy of miraculous revelation; to the non-devout reader, a ghostly vision of an abbess “in a white robe/ drawn up [,] up/ on golden cords of virtue/ brighter than the moon” can’t help sounding a bit kitsch.

Words are scattered across the page in a way that feels natural, the blank space deftly controlling timing. Each poem is preceded by what Wiggins calls a “hic”: a kind of medieval news bulletin, short fragments laid out in a block of justified text, mixing fact, gossip and lyrical scene-setting: “Aethelred has married Normandy/ and gift-slain all the Danes in England”; “These bloody days of war, England a hog’s back bristling with iron”. 

These “hics” create a sharp contrast between characters’ largely gentle lives and the brutal world they inhabit. In one poem, a Maud de Leveland meets England’s most exotic new arrival – an elephant: “All London out to see the horned moons of his teeth. He is like a fond uncle, his soft pink tongue and grin. He is kept well on wine and beef.” It’s sweet. But the “hic” of the next poem leaps forward in time, harrowingly informing us that in the tower where the elephant was once kept, there are now “Six hundred Jews imprisoned”.

In later poems the personalities blur, the voices becoming less effectively delineated. But the early characters leap from the page. Abbess Wulfhild speaks with iron resolve (“This abbey of terrible ash, I will raise it from the ground”), while gossipy Abbess Hildelith slips between French and English: “And hound’s teeth! I’ve had it with Berngith/  that trick avec les œufs and her blue teeth/ Lord but she is/ funny”. 

One thing these women all share is a love of books, revering the written word for the way it keeps names alive. A woman scribbles “Wolfruna me fecit” (“Wolfruna (me) made it”) on a bit of stolen parchment in a bid for immortality. It’s a world where books work wonders: “Little curls are scraped from holy books... given in water to assuage an ague.” And The Lost Book of Barkynge achieves its own minor miracle; Wiggins, like Wulfhild, has raised a lost abbey out of the terrible ashes. TFS

The Lost Book of Barkynge is published by Shearsman at £12.95

February: The Fourth Sister by Laura Scott

Anton Chekhov’s characters are, with very few exceptions, in need of a good slap. (I say this as a fan.) From the safe distance of the stalls, they may look tragic or comic, pitiable or noble. But imagine living with them! All carping on about their own problems while blind to everyone else’s, always talking past each other, “floundering out their truths,” as Laura Scott brilliantly puts it here. In Chekhov’s plays, everybody speaks; nobody listens.

Scott, however, is a listener. One achievement of her poetry collection The Fourth Sister – one of many – is the way she summons a tidal wave of talk, then surfs above it. Her style is effortlessly readable and lucid, her effects understated and slow-building, via garden-path sentences that end in extraordinary images. It’s a book that rewards re-reading.

In Scott’s first book, So Many Rooms (2019), we met characters from Tolstoy. In this follow-up, there are half a dozen pieces explicitly about Chekhov and his creations, and others that implicitly might be – or might as well be, so acutely do they channel his spirit. A poem about the poet exchanging emails with an unnamed “he” finds a neat parallel with a funny, touching poem collaged from Chekhov’s letters to and from his wife Olga. (Olga writes: “Tell me, do we really/ understand even a fraction of life?” Anton replies: “write the essentials so there won’t be two stamps on the envelope”.)

Chekhov’s gift, Scott writes, was giving us “the sound of the small hours” when “words unclasp themselves and start to / stumble and veer between precision and blur in a single line”. That balance of blur and precision is her gift, too. In “To Be One of Them”, she dreams of becoming one of the Three Sisters, wandering into Chekhov’s play “to watch the staircase // fold and collapse under the weight of all our talked thoughts piled up / on each other like a litter of puppies scrambling for milk, to talk and talk// to slow life’s ruin down by playing it backwards and to love / the sound of it”. That long-lined marvel of a poem unspools in three endless sentences, each longer than the last.

“The Wrong Man”, meanwhile, is a two-act tragicomedy in miniature. In a restaurant, the poet listens while a misty-eyed aunt talks at her (not to her) about “the man she should have married. And as she talks her voice holds him up like a waiter/ bending back his wrist to carry a plate of oysters, shimmying through the spaces between/ the tables until I see him, this talked-of man, handsome…” A sting arrives in the final lines, as Scott’s focus shifts to the un-talked-of man who shares their table: “my poor uncle”. The man who’s physically present is less vivid than the one summoned from words; an idea Scott returns to more than once. (“In the Doorway”, a little gem, pulls off the same trick.)

There’s plenty else here: nightmarish fables about bird-haunted women; poems of love and desire (“Your Eyes” is a torch song Cole Porter and John Donne would both enjoy); moving elegies about losing a mother and father; and empty-nest laments – no less moving, perhaps surprisingly – about bidding farewell to a grown daughter and son.

Many read like autobiography, but in a book so keenly “balanced between telling and withholding”, the question of whether the characters of any particular piece are from Scott’s life or from a play is irrelevant. What matters is the always-convincing intensity of feeling. That intensity does sometimes stumble into sentimentality or preciousness (“Poor sea, dying and crying, in your heart of hearts you know your salty tears // only make things worse”). Still, any great high-wire act occasionally falls on their face.

Perhaps the most appealing thing about The Fourth Sister is the theatrical intimacy of the voice: a kind of stage whisper, often addressed to a specific but unnamed “you”. We are the audience, but not the addressee. “I really love it when you talk about things,” Anton wrote to Olga. I love to hear Scott talk about things, even when – no, especially when – it feels like eavesdropping. TFS

The Fourth Sister is published by Carcanet at £11.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books

January: Was It for This by Hannah Sullivan

Hannah Sullivan won the TS Eliot prize with her very first collection, Three Poems (2018), a terrific triptych about pregnancy, her father’s death, and life in New York, alert to literary tradition yet sounding fresh. This confident follow-up proves it was no fluke, giving us – what else? – another three poems, this time more tightly linked to a single theme: what it means to make a home.

In “Tenants”, memories of watching the Grenfell Tower fire as a new mother, and the stories of parents and children trapped inside, meet stray images subtly mirroring the fire and rescue attempt – a beekeeper “hacking jaggedly” at rotting honeycomb, or “my mother’s womb biopsied,/ hacked about and binned,/ that bit of home, like all homes lost”. In blank verse, rhymed couplets and ballad metre, Sullivan puts her formal skills to bitterly effective use, finding a glib jingle in the Grenfell inquiry’s bureaucratese (“this report is avowedly provisional./ We await further evidentiary material”).

The long title poem is a memoir, mostly in affectless prose, of places the poet has lived in the UK and US, the housing crisis its muted subtext. “We moved to San Francisco. It was a listless place.” (Most places, in this telling, sound listless.) The sharp details and self-deprecating anecdotes suggest Sullivan could write a good, Rachel Cusk-ish novel about brief, passive conversations with strangers, but the drumbeat of middle-class signifiers – a self-aware tic in Three Poems and here – begins to grate. Some lines could come from the @BougieLitWoman Twitter parody account: “I bought a small leopardskin bag. I went to the Berg and read TS Eliot’s letters to Virginia Woolf in an attempt to retrieve the summer’s purpose.”

One line from that sagging middle section – “I wanted all of it again to do again” – recurs in the very fine final poem, “Happy Birthday”, a winningly spiky meditation on life’s sagging middle. It finds the poet at 41, “sour with the grit of living” and surrounded by her toddler’s Lego, resigned to the idea that from hereon “the body that/ I got to go on living in/ would be a curio […] taken from the mantelpiece,/ to polish, pass around”. Tightly written, rich in humanity and humour, this personal grumble at time itself inspires some of the book’s sharpest phrasemaking. It’s the poem here with the least to say, but the one that says it best. TFS

Was It for This is published by Faber & Faber at £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books