Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)
Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between source and target language, there is always a gap; the translator endeavours within that gap to identify meaning and intention, and that is the difficult work of translation. Fetch, Bramwell’s own debut collection, lyrically thematises this gap in the poet-human’s condition: “I’m an instrument for something else / a digital piano that if you opened it up / you wouldn’t understand the wiring.” Fetch (in Celtic folklore, a doppelganger) is by turns solemnly tender, comically worldly, literarily devout. Here you’ll find deep engagement with Russian poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, poems that fuse Scots and English, alongside filial memories and premonitions of fatherhood. “Death is certain, but back then I was too young for that shit.” For a debut, Bramwell’s poetics convey an uncanny sense of wisdom, patience and, eventually, peace.

Girling by Eve Esfandiari-Denney (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Before theme and subject, there is the pure, iridescent beauty of Esfandiari-Denney’s sentences; a singular voice that is alluring and sensuous, pleasurable to follow to whichever subject the poet chooses. The subjects are girlhood-cum-womanhood, the line between debilitating illness and delusional wellness (“thank god / you invested / in lion’s mane”), the flickering concept of free will for a species so programmed by genes: “I have wondered to what extent my cancer diagnosis is my mother’s, or my grandmother’s cell mutation, before my own … I look up from a cigarette mid-sentence…” The collection hybridises recognisable prose forms: the essay, the diary, the text message, the anecdote. These are interspliced with short-lined lyric poems that startle because of the bubbly voice from which they come: “I hope it’s ok to die. I can / become something / like actualised metaphor.” The magic of this collection is that it is never highfalutin, finding a way to make an ending like “DJ are you listening did you read to the end will you blow my voice a kiss” powerfully funny and moving.

The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber by Jay Gao (Carcanet, £12.99)
“This is how the buried live. Poetry”. The title of this collection alone will illuminate what kind of poet Gao is: insistent, sprawling, and conceptually daring. The poems in this collection are not spoken by a tree, but rather embody a tree’s form, each line like a budding leaf, simultaneously discreet, and genetically preordained by the bark from which it sprouts: “Mustering diction in the interest of the non-human”; “On the horizon, a filthy war dog shakes her remaindered vernal atoms free”; or, one of my favourite lines, “You wanted the intimacy of two words who shared a sound to unsecure that wild”. Every couple of pages there are “splinters”, single words with ultra-long dashes that could grammatically and sonically replace a word in the preceding line: “A splinter of duration lodged inside times’ ruche, awaiting salvage …” is followed by a page-long em-dash before the word “selvedge”. Gao joins the ranks of poets such as CD Wright and Lyn Hejinian: not for the faint of heart, but an endless well of brilliance and deep feeling if one can undergo their clause-by-clause compressive inventions.

Belling the Leopard by Clementine Ewokolo Burnley (Bloodaxe, £14)
There’s an imaginative heaviness to Belling the Leopard, so composed of the proper names of people, places and things that each poem feels like a constructed miniature: “Liberated Africans, Jamaicans, and English / missionaries lived side by side in eight / corrugated iron shelters shipped / from Clarence.” The forced migrations and enslavement of colonialism create a latticework of place across the collection, which is Burnley’s primary structuring principle. Between the Caribbean, western Africa and western Europe, Burnley describes the intimate violence and domestic and cultural fallout of their comingling histories: “All the flights from Africa used to transit through a European capital city. Ethiopian Airlines no longer touches down in the nine hours it takes to fly from Turtle Island to Togo. Sometimes the border agencies use commercial flights for deportations.” At times, this debut collection feels overwritten, certain narratives more like onslaughts of information and impression with little effect. It is at its best when memory and lyric fuse, where the line between recounting and reshaping blurs: “We rub each other raw in the same spots / and if you’re starting to lose / arguments, I notice I no longer need to win.” There’s much to admire here.

The Matter by Padraig Regan (Carcanet, £12.99)
Regan’s sophomore collection echoes the structure of their first: lyric poem sequences with a long(ish) essay splitting up the sections. Here, they intensify their engagements with the material world, “chiefly animals, minerals and vegetables”. Lines from the poem A Venus Flower Basket sum up the stylistic changes Regan has made, from parsed syntactical lines to more high-octane fragmentations: “Drowned Arachne! / except: what it spins / it is. & who wouldn’t / want to wear their bones / on the outside / if they could sparkle”. Elsewhere, the poet addresses Gogotte, a naturally occurring “concretion of very fine, very pure sands”, primarily found in France. Gogotte has a way of looking like finely sculpted ceramic work, allowing the poet to drift from the geological to musings on the body’s evanescence, gay saunas, and language itself: “I am a poet, Gogotte: I spend my life trying to come up with verbal structures commensurate with the unstructurable mess of being-in-the world.” Though the collection can feel unevenly motley in some aspects, Regan has a knack for startling detail and lush description, as in the poem A Belemnite: “An off white seam runs jagged / down its length / like an injury; // its surface is a register / of glances & impacts / against whose grain I read the // long, posthumous biography”. This voice can be spellbinding.