My 2019 in Poetry

     

                  

I was on holiday, and away from a computer, when all of the end-of-decade best-of lists were getting written up and passed around. So here’s mine, rather late and for just one year. And as not much more than a list of my favourite poetry discoveries (and a few re-discoveries).

Laura Ritland, East and West (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2018).

The collection that’s given me the most pleasure these last twelve months. Superb poems on giant squid, jellyfish, sharks, sea spiders, a perfect opening piece in ‘Summer Parties’ (‘the indifference/ of unopened books and the radio’s paper voice/ talking of tragedies in the next door room.’). A good, showing-off and fun sonnet ‘for winding late clocks’. So much clever thoughtfulness. 

Emily Jungmin Yoon, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).

‘I’m being as honest as a woman can’: most of the reviews I’ve read have, rightly probably, focused on the testimonial poems and their historical and political importance. That mattered for me too, of course, but I worry the publishers perhaps downplay Yoon’s virtuosity when they package this as ‘urgently relevant for our times’. It’s that, absolutely, but it’s also dazzling artistry. The series of poems each title ‘An Ordinary Misfortune’ especially.  History is what hurts.

Sasha Dugdale, Joy (Manchester: Carcanet, 2017).

The long opening poem, imagining and voicing Catherine Blake after William’s death, I was lucky to read first at Blake’s grave after seeing the big exhibition of his at the Tate, and that coloured my response accordingly. There’s a wonderful villanelle in here, too.

John Dickson, What happened on the way to Oamaru (Christchurch: Untold Books, 1986).

Irregular punctuation! Typewriter tabulation! Hairy tales! Lots of period markers here, but lots more also from the great ‘asset stripper of that wonderful junk heap known as European culture’. ‘Do you always make so much fuss / over something that happens each day?’

Kate Lilley, Tilt (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2018).

Press coverage talked sometimes of the ‘revelations’ of abuse in this collection but, as Lilley herself has pointed out, the stories were always there in her mother’s own poetry. That they passed unremarked of course makes that worse. What stick with me as also particularly powerful are ‘Harm’s Way’, a meditation on the dishonest work language is made to do in the Australian state’s refugee regime, and ‘Tilt’, a complex and beautiful memory of a lost Sydney.

Alison Croggon, The Blue Gate (Melbourne: Black Pepper, 1997).

The Yarra’s Whitman, with some vaunting sonnets thrown in for good measure. And ‘Life with its kindling firsts / strikes a sudden pain / inside my pelvis.’ The ‘sorrow / of your swelling mother / who cannot remember.’

Bill Manhire, The Victims of Lightning (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010).

‘1950s’ and ‘The Best Burns Statue’ especially. I could do without the songs, but.

Sarah Howe, Loop of Jade (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015).

‘The way my father,/ in his affable moods, always thinks you/ want a gin and tonic too.’

Anna Livesey, Good Luck (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2003).

‘the very mud of our belief, the swamp of/ our blinding, devastating revelation.’

Kevin Connolly, Asphalt Cigar (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995).

Lots of period silliness (and charm), sure, and lots of strutting, but ‘Style is a collision of speed and beauty.’

Kathleen Hellen, The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (Hilo: Saddle Road Press, 2018).

Poems exploring the history of U.S. occupation in Japan and the post-war period, a history Hellen is connected to through her own life and her parents’ roles.

Mia Ayumi Malhorta, Isako Isako (Farmington: Alice James Books, 2018).

A debut collection, and a contribution to the literature memorializing and exploring Japanese-American internment in the United States during the Pacific War, and its long aftermath in individual and community suffering. ‘A History of Lost Things’.

The two critical works that have stuck with me are Stephen Hollis’s Almost Islands (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2018) on ‘Phyllis Webb and the pursuit of the unwritten’, and Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016). Hollis’s a lovely, thoughtful, meandering walk around Webb’s work, as well as around his own. Lerner’s has all that you’d expect, but is also an affectingly sincere bit of worrying at why poetry matters and feels wrong at the same time. There’s an egotistical generosity at work in poetry, he argues, trying to project individual experience into a communal, universal, Truth out there beyond us all. And he pulls off a proper close reading of McGonagall.