New poetry: Frank Ormsby keeps us on our toes and Mina Gorji offers wonderful debut

The poems in Frank Ormsby's seventh collection, The Rain Barrel (Bloodaxe), treat familiar objects with a slant charm, giving them histories, personalities, and minds of their own. They become like small gods or totems in the farmland. The highlight of the collection is its title poem, a sequence of 17 parts, which feels inspired by Wallace Stevens's masterful Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Ormsby's observations, here, move from the wry ("it maintains the judicious silence/ for which rain barrels are famous") to an astute exactitude which Stevens's himself would be proud of.

At 100 pages, this is quite a long collection, and is book-ended by the stronger poems, but Ormsby’s arrangement, dipping unexpectedly into darkness, then lifting into poems that are comedic, colloquial, and seem to wink knowingly at the reader, keeps us on our toes.

The cadences of Ormsby’s verse create a subtle music, and (though he rarely uses set forms in this collection) make use a free rhyme that brings out the distinct accent of his poetry. In The Black Kettle, for example, the household object, planted with nasturtiums in a garden, is “at home and visible and unmistakably ours;/ a local fire-god with a tongue of flowers”. One can hear Ormsby’s spoken voice here, gently forging a rhyme.

The reader is constantly made aware, too, of the dance of their eye across the page. Ormsby treats a line of verse as though it were something like a glowstick, that might be snapped in the place of pressure, its energy suddenly breaking out. This joy in enjambment creates many of the most surprising and effective moments in the work. In a short poem, White-Throated Sparrows, Ormsby observes:

Laura Cassidy’s Walk of Fame: A boulevard of broken dreams

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‘In the black culture here in the US, we have a crisis of masculinity’

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Margaret Skinnider: radical feminist, militant nationalist, trade union activist

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"The minute we stop to listen
the evening includes
us and the white-throated birds."

Ormsby’s surprise – that “the evening includes/ us” – is generated in no small way by the break of the line, and carries that feeling home to the reader, who is in turn surprised by the unfolding of the sentence, and feels, in turn, included.

Gerard Smyth's The Sundays of Eternity (Dedalus), as its title would suggest, deals with captured memories, often looked back to fondly, as though these poems were stays against time. Smyth's verse is quiet, and has a practised ease; however, over the course of a full collection, this slow-paced description and sepia tone can have the effect of dissipating the energy of the book.

The poems here are, by their own admission, concerned with what The Given Chance calls “the bliss of memory”, and this often leads to the romanticism of hindsight, or to poems whose relationship to their subject is too easy, and doesn’t involve much friction. We feel the nostalgia, and the lack of high stakes makes it tempting to disengage. Poems such as Aphrodite, Waterloo Sunset, and Old Flames, all suffer from this sense of indulgence in “the sepia years” of the past.

There are riskier poems here, though, and these are among the best. News from Aleppo (dealing with more urgent subject matter, and tapping into the energy of its risk), conveys a sense of its own unease. This means that we can see Smyth becoming more alert, his verse enlivening:

"If they drown on the shores of Europe
they rise again in fishermen's nets.
If they pass through customs checks
the hands of body searchers reopen their wounds."

This move back to the body, and to something visceral, shot through with anger, brings Smyth closer to an energetic engagement with his subject, perhaps because he is at odds with it. Here, we feel the poem as process, the mind at work behind it. Likewise, in Horses from Kildare, a poem about homelessness, the political edge gives a sharpness and bitterness to Smyth’s voice that is refreshing. The use of a repeating stanza form, in this poem, is also a welcome change, and adds a formal variety that is missing elsewhere.

Like Ormsby's collection, Mina Gorji's debut Art of Escape (Carcanet) is understated and has a beautiful clarity of form. Many of the poems here feel like small miracles in themselves, and draw our attention to the small miracles of their subjects. Often short, and working in a mode of deceptively simple declarative statements, Gorji's work is thoroughly modern, though it takes influence from writers such as John Clare, and Rumi. The descriptive mode that these poets share is put to astonishing use by Gorji, whose poems have a sense of understated wisdom. One even detects the work of Robert Burns and Gerard Manley Hopkins in poems such as Tineola Bisselliella and Beside the River, which are by turns fondly humorous and imagistically-acute. It's hard to resist simply quoting Gorji's work over and over in place of a review. Polipo, Bittern, the two poems that make up Spirit Grounds, each has a carved clarity which surely conceals a significant amount of work and thought. Take Beside the River, for example:

"we look up:
so many shooting stars!
A flash, and then they seem to slow:
one after another,
flash and fade.
These are not stars
but landing lights –
not blazing out,
but coming home."

Here, we are given so much: a sense of wonder, a volta, a return from the skies to the earth, and then finally a subtle reflection on belonging. Gorji’s fellow Carcanet poet, Thomas A Clark, works in similarly short stanzas, focusing on the minutiae of the natural world, though Gorji succeeds in suggesting the emotional and political resonances of her chosen subjects, from octopi to wasps and moths and onward to the planets and the stars. At the heart of the collection is “escape”, which becomes a loaded and contested term. Migration and the movements of animals are held up alongside the histories and realities of human migration, and in the essay (which is also a prose poem) that closes the book, these resonances are made more explicit, though handled no less subtly. Art of Escape is a wonderful debut from a poet whose craft is delicate and complex, and who feels instinctively the manifold connectedness of life.