After by Jane Hirshfield (Bloodaxe, £8.95)
There is a savour of nostalgia to Jane Hirshfield's latest, TS Eliot-shortlisted collection: a fin-de-siècle awareness of time's passing, audible in the title and echoing all the way down to individual images of "erosive mountains", "eclipsable moons", "last autumn's chastened berries". The poems exude a palpable sense of longing for a world that can be seen but never truly possessed. "I wanted something, I wanted. I could not have it," the poet sighs, " ... this world thick with birdsong, / tender with starfish and apples."
Her occupation with this gap between desire and fulfilment carries over into an intense interest in gaps in general; in particular, the fissures within the self. "To be undivided must mean not knowing you are," she muses, watching fog creep over a garden, obliterating separations (images of fog, along with mountains and dogs, punctuate the volume). Her poems, as a consequence, focus inwards. "Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins," she reflects in her opening poem, and the rest of the collection exists almost as a proof of that theory: her poems render into words the minutest human actions and reactions, allowing the reader the distance to see them clearly.
Averno by Louise Glück (Carcanet, £9.95)
Averno is the name given to a lake a few miles outside Naples, believed by the ancient Romans to be a gateway to the underworld. In her latest intense and ambitious collection, Glück - a former Pulitzer prizewinner - fuses the myth of the lake (a porous barrier between the states of life and death, body and soul) with that of the goddess Persephone, the "born wanderer" whose time was spent shuttling back and forth across the border. Glück uses their combined symbolism to explore the epistemological questions of self, god and mortality that form the backbone of her poetry.
The fate of the collection's "I" closely mirrors that of Persephone; she too finds herself poised in a no man's land, "standing / in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal", while the stars wheel overhead and the earth beneath her feet is "in flux ... shifting and changing". The poems, set amid woods and mountains in a landscape of "bare chestnut trees" and "pools of cold light" that is permanently (in another nod to Persephone) locked in winter, are watchful and tend to conclude with questions. Like the lake itself, they are conduits, offering readers both an end and a beginning.
