The latest poetry releases offer a rich tapestry of voices and themes, from childhood memories in 1960s Britain to ecopoetry and translations of mystical verse. Here is a roundup of five notable collections.
Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)
Daljit Nagra continues his exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience in west London. Yiewsley, a real suburb, becomes a lens for identity and time. As Nagra turns 60, the 1960s and 1970s form a time capsule where Enoch Powell and the National Front cast violent shadows, but parkas, school blancmange, and cricket strike a sweeter, elegiac note. His playful manipulation of English adds zest to this personal and political journey.
Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Fitzcarraldo continues to invigorate British poetry with intellectually glamorous works. Mer de Glace, named after a dying French glacier, is set along Poland's Vistula River, where Lebda ran in 2021. Recurring images of fires and firesides evoke vulnerability in a wild world. This ecopoetry is profound yet informal, challenging and pleasurable. Rosenthal's translations are quietly fluent, offering lines like "books that help us close the mouth of night" and light as "Baltic mercury."
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
Winner of an American National Book Award, Smith's voice is incandescent with the grotesque and cruel aspects of Black American experience, balanced by deeply sexy lyricism. In "Your Man," she writes, "I wait for his mouth, the mercy circle." The collection embraces contemporary urban life—addicts' needles, church deacons—while evoking historical trauma: Emmett Till's casket photo and enslaved women's voices. Female experience is central, from the famous opener "What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren't)."
Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches, £11.99)
Dastidar's fourth collection is energetically eclectic, finding poetry in "bullshit jobs," Tory nationalism, jukeboxes, and funk dancing. He spins from topic to topic, proving the genre's vitality. His writing—sonnets, ghazals, an alphabet poem—often glitters, especially in the title sonnet celebrating city life, dating, and "being kissed brimful … under the cherry blossom every Saturday night."
Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose by St John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland (Penguin Classics, £12.99)
Sprackland's translation of the 16th-century mystic's poetry and prose is provocative and timely. Colin Thompson's introduction precedes Sprackland's Translator's Note, which highlights the challenges of rendering this strange, burning work. The poems retain the allure that attracted TS Eliot, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton, and Pope John Paul II. Imagery of "falcon love" and a "wounded hart" in the "wild wood" or "shepherding night" balances the hieratic and human.
