Here we are again, at the poets’ Christmas party. Pour yourself a mugful of mulled wine and try not to get stuck in the hallway with the sort of Men Who Feed Pigeons (Bloodaxe, £12), inimitably skewered in Selima Hill’s bite-sized portraits. “Familiar, inert, he’s like a table,” she writes of one. “Watching him eat brandy snaps, I’m learning/ not to keep expecting to be heard.”
Was that the doorbell? A God at the Door (Bloodaxe, £10.99) brings mixed tidings: responses to harrowing recent events in Indian poet Tishani Doshi’s home country, but also strange disjunctions, offbeat humour, flashes of hope.
Catullus is in the basement, but he’s a bit tied up, literally – Isobel Williams’s naughty translation Shibari Carmina (Carcanet, £12.99) puts the Roman poet in a bondage dungeon. Leave him to his ropes, and instead follow the sound of music upstairs to meet Miguel, whose “allegiance is to a Hammond B3/ that, if you play it right, will disclose,/ by sympathetic magic of its stuck key,/ the traces of a blacker melody”. Miguel’s is one of many lives touched by HIV in an arresting crown of sonnets from Kayo Chingonyi’s elegiac A Blood Condition (Chatto & Windus, £10).
A louder racket comes from another sonnet sequence next door, where Smashing Pumpkins singer Billy Corgan is jamming with – could it be? Surely not! – W B Yeats. Their worlds collide in Stephen Sexton’s fleet-footed and irrepressibly charming Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin, £9.99).
Sonnets are everywhere. Just ask Luke Kennard, whom we find “in the kitchen with a man who says he can recite any of Shakespeare’s sonnets”. Ignore that show-off, and read Kennard’s Notes on the Sonnets (Penned in the Margins, £9.99) instead: a wise, funny, devilishly clever book of prose poems, all set at a house party rather like this one.
There’s a scoop of Kennardishness in Jenna Clake’s Museum of Ice Cream (Bloodaxe, £9.95), its humour belying her subject; the toll of an eating disorder. You must Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet, £10.99) warns Victoria Kennefick, in a debut that approaches that same theme via the Irish Famine, Catholicism and Freudian fantasies of cannibalism. Faith and flesh are also fruitfully explored in Jude Nutter’s thoughtful, sensuous Dead Reckoning (Salmon, £11).
The dining room may be Overrun by Wild Boars (Flipped Eye, £6.95), but Maia Elsner is still there, celebrating “Christmas in diaspora” with her Polish-Mexican family, “our usual Chanukah candles/ on the tree”. Elsner explores trauma through imagined visits to Mayan temples; Alice Hiller puts Pompeii to the same use in Bird of Winter (Pavilion, £9.99), its ruins a powerful symbol for the poet’s buried memories of abuse. Reading Hiller’s cut-up snippets of other texts, the reader becomes a fellow explorer, sifting the wreckage of the past; a similar effect comes from the redacted reports on a Romanian orphanage in Maria Stadnicka’s Buried Gods Metal Prophets (Guillemot, £12), and Gail McConnell’s The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), which draws on newspaper cuttings about her father’s murder by the IRA.
Indecisive? You’ll find poems from all the above (bar Williams) in the stocking-sized The Forward Book of Poetry 2022 (Faber, £9.99).
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