The Bonfire Party by Sean O’Brien (Picador, £12.99)
This sombre collection showcases O’Brien’s varied use of forms and subject matter, exploring themes of history, remembrance of war and political conflict, death, time, the passing of friends and loved ones as well as human desire and culpability. A central sequence entitled Impasse is inspired by Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems plunge us into the landscape of the detective hero’s world, a process O’Brien describes as “analogous to dream-life, where certain motifs (cities, railway stations, libraries in my case) recur without ever abolishing the mystery that animates them”. The penultimate poem of the final sequence ushers in an elegiac, pensive tone as the speaker reminds us not to forget “birdsong / the descant of the rising lark / that never ends, composed of silence”. The book reinforces O’Brien’s authority as a chronicler of our times, “love and death consorting as they must”.
Plastic by Matthew Rice (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
This book-length poem explores the experiences of a night worker turned poet. Structured as a continuous narrative, it illustrates the frustrations, inequities and relentless cycle of 21st-century manual labour: “The night is proletarian, a morgue of ghosts / given the present is a borderline”. Rice documents the tragic incidents and surreal imaginings that occur within the nightmarish confines of a plastic moulding factory. “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope / another’s heart gave out at 3am / performing a task as menial as mine.” This sardonic, bleakly moving book interrogates ideas of working-class masculinity and intergenerational trauma, with “hell as an idea of what work could be”; there are glimpses of hope in poetry itself, “the treasure buried in my father’s field”.
Retablo for a Door by Michelle Penn (Shearsman, £12.95)
Penn’s latest collection draws on the concept of a retablo – a votive created in thanks for protection or a miracle – to explore challenging aspects of female experience. In doing so, she conveys multiple images of womanhood as “a gallery of retablos, every edge, every overcoming”. Divided into seven sections, these vivid and formally innovative poems engage with ideas of performance and becoming, depicting vulnerable moments of self-effacement and discomfort in the search for identity. The exploration of intense emotions culminates in the final poem’s searing assertion of defiance as it champions “the humiliated girls, the taunted girls, the bullied girls and the rejected girls”. Penn envisages their uprising and rebellion as they “nap on the sand’s neck, soak in the ocean / defy the world where women trail girls / behind them like flames”.
Jonah and Me by John F Deane (Carcanet, £12.99)
Deane’s poetry shimmers with the luminosity of his Christian faith, explored through various voices. He exhorts us to live a life filled with reverence for “Yeshua – you, water-walker”, to whom the poet comes to “offer poems, petitionary, like prayers”. These lucid, musical poems are attuned to the beauty of nature, “waves of grass under the breeze / and gracious meadows wild with buttercups”. Deane acknowledges the fragmented times we live in – “we know that barbarism / divides us, soul from soul” and “the world faces its nightmares / of wars and violence”. This is an expansive, sonically rich collection, filled with captivating images and resonant phrases that leave us with a sense of wonder. The final poem gestures towards a spiritual departure from life as the speaker envisions slipping “through the red gate”, finding “the longed-for strength”, “towards a long-anticipated rest”.
Intimate Architecture by Tess Jolly (Blue Diode, £10)
The titular poem of Jolly’s second collection evokes the image of a doll’s house where the walls are “as tender as our honeycomb of chambers / protected by paper-thin membranes”. Many of the poems explore the need for “delicate” boundaries in a relationship between the self and the other. Recalling fairytale, myth and childhood memory, these well-crafted works reveal inner anxieties as they collide with external realities, “the structures we built from our fear of the world”. Jolly skilfully depicts the tensions within human relationships as well as the desire for intimacy, where “those who love her / learn to hold their tongues / as she holds them / at arm’s length – longing / to let herself be held”. Her use of imagery is arresting: “the stars like tiny bulbs so bright / they could, at any moment, shatter”; a forest which “imagines a different story”; the fragility of an anorexic female body, “your flamingo legs … the trick of your stick-insect arms”.
