Yiewsley by Daljit Nagra (Faber, £14.99)
Given the relish with which Nagra pushes and pulls at English, it’s worth noting that Yiewsley is a real west London suburb. This location allows him to continue his career-long exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience and, through it, wider questions of identity. But as Nagra turns 60, location is becoming increasingly a matter of time as well as space. The classic struggle of each first generation to arrive in Britain, and the pressure on its kids to make good, now sits within a 1960s and 70s time capsule. Enoch Powell and the National Front cast violent shadows, but parkas, school blancmange and cricket strike a sweeter, almost elegiac note.
Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Much as they have in prose, Fitzcarraldo are awakening British poetry publishing to the glamour of braininess. Mer de Glace is named for a dying French glacier, but the sequence is set on the 1,047km-long Polish river Vistula, along which Lebda ran in 2021. Images of fires and firesides recur: we are all of us out in a wild, vulnerable world. This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable. Rosenthal’s quietly fluent translations give us “books that help us close the mouth of night”, light as “Baltic mercury” and, as the runner nears the end of her journey, a “pelvis tilting / towards the open sea”.
The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems by Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
It’s not surprising this has won an American National Book award. Smith’s passionate voice is incandescent with all that’s grotesque and cruel in American Black experience, but also with a deeply sexy lyricism: in Your Man, “I wait for his mouth, the mercy circle”. This New and Selected Poems embraces contemporary urban life, from addicts’ needles to church deacons. But elsewhere the infamous photo of Emmett Till in his casket is evoked alongside actual photos of enslaved women, which frame a sequence giving them voice. And female experience is everywhere, right from the famous opener, What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t).
Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak by Rishi Dastidar (Nine Arches, £11.99)
Dastidar is a poet of energy and presence. This fourth collection is thematically eclectic; anything can be the occasion for poetry, from “bullshit jobs” to Tory nationalism, jukeboxes to “funk dancing”. As Dastidar spins us from topic to topic, we find ourselves believing, with he, that this proves the vitality of the genre. Besides, his writing itself – which includes sonnets, ghazals, even an alphabet poem – often glitters. It does so especially in the title poem, a sonnet celebrating all that’s accelerated: city life, dating, “being kissed brimful … under the cherry blossom every Saturday night”.
Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose by St John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland (Penguin Classics, £12.99)
Every generation makes key texts its own. Sprackland’s new translation of the poetry and meditative prose of the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross is both provocative and timely. A contextualising introduction by Colin Thompson, himself an earlier translator, is followed by Sprackland’s own crunchy Translator’s Note a brilliant taster of the challenges she and predecessors rise to. In her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions, the works themselves retain all the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí, Thomas Merton and Pope John Paul II. “Falcon love” and a “wounded hart” brave the “wild wood” or “shepherding night”: imagery both hieratic and human.