Poets often remember and see their speakers in places we had either forgotten or not imagined, an act that acquires a peculiar force in elegies, those empty mirrors the poet makes out of known material, which find a way into private, hard-to-articulate feelings. The best contemporary elegies are, too, wary of consolation, sometimes casting an accusing eye on their own activity.
A new book by the young English poet Emily Berry, Stranger, Baby (Faber & Faber, £10.99), takes its cue from Denise Riley and Anne Carson's quizzical probing of the way language leads us both towards and away from its subjects. The book's first poem, Sign of the Anchor, begins "I stood at the dangerous shore", but by the end of the poem the bystander speaker has been almost completely submerged by her subject: "I was far out, in wet denim, and the shore was a jolt when I looked back."
Images of the sea, and encounters with Freud, recur. Berry’s style, a little playful and occasionally arch, is never ponderous or predictable:
Watching the sea is like watching something in pieces continually striving to be whole
Imagine trying to pick up a piece of sea and show it to a person
I tried to do that
All that year I visited a man in a room
I polished my feelings
(Picnic)
One of the book's occasions, the death of the poet's mother, comes into focus unexpectedly: "I move from blank mouth to empty face. / Things don't get better, they get worse" is the blunt opening to The degenerating anatomic structures of your body. "I made myself a lullaby once", she continues, but then, suddenly, the poet is brought up short by the fact of her situation:
Stop, because,
Your actual bones exist, and if I could,
I would bear them with a fiery zeal,
with the fury of all dead mothers' children,
I would bear your actual bones, and I do.
Katie Donovan's new book, Off Duty (Bloodaxe, £9.95), emerged out of the illness and premature death of her partner. Donovan records the devastating impact of that illness and loss on her relationships to her young children, her extended family and partner. She is unflinching about what she records, and the writing's fidelity to her experiences is communicated clearly in every poem in the book.
The overwhelming disaster of her situation overshadows the mother-daughter play of The Game of Sleep:
I tickle and trip, revelling
in her giggly mouth's cascade,
her nuzzling joy,
a gift this bed bestows,
just as her begetting here
was rose; was gold.
If Donovan's subject is compelling, her style is more jagged: buttoned-down plainness coexists with tender, naively rendered details, alongside occasional shifts to a higher and more obviously poetic register. It is a tricky combination, but, as with the resolving medial rhyme (of rose / bestows) at the end of The Game of Sleep, it can be surprising and effective.
Because the poems so often set themselves at odds with any romantic or escapist response to their terrible occasion, such moments are rare. Donovan’s book presents the reader instead with uncomfortable images, none more so than those of the speaker coming to terms with her role as single parent, or carer, in poems that are punishingly self-conscious.
In Wash her daughter "turns to me her too-white face, / falling on her mother's breast: / although I'm a thorny nest, / just now I'm all she's got." In Falling the determination to say, honestly, what happened means the language alludes to that great contriver of poetic form and image George Herbert, but it then seems to exhaust itself as the poem presses its sad confession:
This business of falling out of love
is long and grim, unlike the falling in.
It has no name, drifts around our house
getting in the way. It is the guest
we can't recall inviting –
that we hope will leave, but never does.
Massively inconvenient,
it impedes our chores –
and is ignored by everyone else.
I've tried guilt-tripping myself,
but love won't come back
on my command.
Adam White's What Else Is There? (Doire, €12) is the France-based poet's second book, a follow-up to his Forward Prize-shortlisted Accurate Measurements (2013). Again White draws on the language of carpentry and building as a sort of imaginative framework. In one of the book's elegies, Elegy for a Welder, he hears of his uncle's death and registers his sense of permanent loss, "the way a vice tightens / that week your news broke / and now, you know, will never let go," before he situates the poem and the uncle's life in "the bigger silence this is held in".
The restraint of the writing is impressive here and in the book's best poems. A Load of Firewood seems to describe this successful technique:
the way a woodpile
drying in the right conditions
has the fat worked off it by the years,
and downsizes
to a tightening of material,
the way less volume means more heat.
White stretches himself in other poems, which do not always possess the same intensity as those poems which slow down and go over their subjects. He includes a tribute to Philip Larkin, whose removed perspective he characterises as "gone / to the other side of life and looking on" (Larkin), although his own sympathies with things of this world are clear in Robial Habstrom. That poem's perspective on migrant traffic through Calais asks readers to consider stories that are not just "front-page-story speak / and brass-necked eldorado talk" about a European promised land, pointing instead to "original restlessness" as being as much a motive for migrant travel as anything else.
John McAuliffe's fourth book is The Way In (Gallery, 2015). He teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing
