Small Birds Singing by Matthew Welton (Carcanet, £12.99)
Written in unrhymed couplets that shrink and grow across the page like a concertina going through its scales, Welton’s poems focus attention on the city through the seasons: weeds through concrete, wasps emerging from the gaps between bricks, frozen towels on a clothesline, the shadows of jackdaws on a lawn. His gaze is neutral, and it often falls on that which we’d normally turn away from, things slightly out of place, or that disturb our sense of propriety: “more cardboard in the recycling bin / than the recycling bin can contain”. This is a poetry of things, like the poetry of Francis Ponge, but as Welton says: “no thinginess without thought”. Welton’s thoughts – though whether they are his or whether they emerge from his surroundings or from the act of writing itself, it is impossible to say – are couched in deliciously riddling couplets: “it is not the habit of patterns / to emphasise the pattern of habits”. He reminds us forcefully that poetry is all around us and within us, that anything can go in a poem: a sandwich, a desiccated lump of duck shit, the pile of junk left outside a house during a refurbishment. Poems can mirror our world in all its messiness, and in doing so let us see it a little bit better.
The Channel by Jana Prikryl (Faber, £12.99
The casual violence of King Lear, the greed, the bureaucracy, and the indifference to human life, make the play particularly resonant to contemporary audiences. In her fourth collection, Prikryl channels the voice of Cordelia to think back through her own family story of displacement from the Czech Republic. Shakespeare’s Lear becomes “a document of fact / of things that happened and keep happening”, enabling Prikryl to explore her own separation from friends and family and her experiences of migration, where home is nowhere. In Dover Calais a ferry trip to France is meshed with the story of Cordelia’s exile, morphing into an account of a ferry disaster which in turn cuts to a scene where refugees make for shore in small boats: “Waves / unreal, and driving rain, the two-year-old / left face-down on a beach nine years ago / came up for me”. Like the scissored-off hospital undershirt in In the Mould, Prikryl’s language cuts off, ending abruptly: “or was the famous sweetness / of grandmother a bluff / which through and through was too”. This rewiring of the sentence creates dazzling leaps of thought, jumping from refugee camps to Shakespeare’s Fool battling with a tsunami of text messages to dissident window cleaners out of the novels of Milan Kundera to tender moments shared with her father. It’s a bold “stepping out of form” that turns its back on the neatness of the lyric, and by doing so creates a new poetic language which, like the language of Calvino in Invisible Cities, is able to connect everything to everything.
Stepmother by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
The ubiquity of the stepmother in fairytales has been explained by psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim as enabling the child to keep the image of the good mother intact. Marina Warner reminds us that their presence is historically connected to the high mortality rate of mothers in childbirth, though today women are more likely to find themselves in the role as a result of divorce. Here Mort explores her own experience of this neglected dimension of maternity alongside its representation in myth. “Better a serpent than a stepmother,” said Euripides, and the sentiment is reinforced across a range of stories where we witness stepmothers abandon their children in forests or simply decapitate them to be rid of them once and for all. Mort shows how traditional images of bad stepmothers are perpetuated in news stories and film, but she finds the modern experience repeating history in more subtle ways: she is jealous of her stepdaughter’s figure, distantly echoing the stepmother in Snow White, or, in an inversion of the way Cinderella is treated, it is the stepmother who finds herself pushed to the edge of her own household by photographs of the husband’s first marriage. Mort’s poems are a vivid compendium of stories, but they also offer ways of escaping the trap of myth: “You did not pick your stepchildren. Nor did they pick you. / But every day you can choose to love each other.”
Drunken Driving by Martina Evans (Carcanet, £12.99)
This electrifying sequel to Evans’s 2023 sonnet sequence The Coming Thing is set 10 years on. Imelda, having put the Cork punk scene behind her, is now a young mother, married to Carl, working shifts at Pentonville prison and learning to negotiate the spiderweb crossroads of London in her red Astra. Appropriately for this carceral environment, the sonnets come cuffed with quotations taken from prison protocols, driving manuals and the novel Dracula: “With strained ears, I listened, and heard downstairs the grinding of the key in the great lock and the falling back of the heavy door.” Immediately we are plunged into a world of dangerous driving, vampiric warders, overcrowding and casual racism. Conversation within the prison walls is frowned upon but outside the banter flies between Imelda and her father Justin: “When I said Pentonville was a Chamber / of Horrors, Justin said, You’ve got an imagination. I’ll give you that. / But I don’t need one! I said. Half of Madame Tussaud’s waxworks were / hanged there. Justin snorted, Highly-strung, like yourself?” Pumped up with adrenaline, fuelled by alcohol, and peppered with razor-sharp observations, this reads like Porridge on steroids.
