"Countries are working hypotheses that sometimes fail," writes Ranjit Hoskote in his substantial and ranging new collection, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs (Arc Publications). Taken from a prescient and unnerving poem, The Refugee Pauses in Flight, it speaks to the multiple failures of that "atlas" of the title – the shifting, mutable geographies of colonialism, terror, economics, darkened throughout by violence.
The refugee escapes, “my wings of flame/ doused”, and has learnt not to look back: “Even the briefest glance over the shoulder/ could turn you to salt on a photograph.” This startling image – itself concerned with image making – traces the human cost of art and its modes of capture and representation.
The Atlas of Lost Beliefs seeks, nevertheless, to excavate, to make mutable that which is portrayed as static, to bring the photograph back into movement. From short lyrics with a terse imagistic quality (such as Sniper’s Drill) to fully imagined and engrossing long poems, Hoskote plumbs history, and resurfaces with knowledge that is both epic and jewel like in its clarity.
In Redburn on Shore Leave, set in 1849 Liverpool, Hoskote establishes a narrative that is filled with voices – the sounds of the ship, the languages of both Redburn and the lascars – which shifts and erases and interrupts itself, creating a squall in which perspectives emerge and submerge in turn.
Through a careful balancing, Tierney manages to chart the mind's search for significance
Bhanu Kapil's How to Wash a Heart (Pavilion), her first full-length collection published in the UK, is a deeply engaging long poem in movements, best read in a single sitting, then revisited. Portraying the difficult, complex relationship between an immigrant "guest" and a citizen "host", How to Wash a Heart interrogates the politics of inclusion, and the loaded concept of hospitality.
Kapil’s skill is in an astute unpicking of language itself, which she achieves through form. The poems, given in single stanzas, fall down the page, and Kapil controls the line-breaks in ways that shock, subvert or question the reader’s response. “It’s exhausting to be a guest/ In somebody else’s house/ Forever.” Likewise, in the lines “Your job is to understand/ What the feedback is”, the meaning and intent of the gaze shifts over the line, implicating the reader into a different mode of attention.
Alert to the spiritual depletion of constant precarity, Kapil’s “guest” speaks in a voice that is both vibrant and clear – it addresses the host, but makes room for the history of the speaker, making for a poetry that is tender and longing while also being direct. A brilliant and complex book, urgent in its message, How to Wash a Heart deserves (and requires) a wide and attentive readership.
The 10 poems in Róisín Tierney's pamphlet Mock-Orange (Rack Press) are skilful and atmospheric. These unsettling, dark lyrics have a wonderful verbal energy; a mythic imagination. Snowberries have a "pale gleam", a "halo", a texture like "a mortician gently filling a bruise". Insects and birds come as harbingers, as though from another world, and are both read as symbols and also dexterous in their evasion of the speaker's quest for applied meaning.
In the striking first poem, Winter Dybbuk, a bat is found face down in the snow, snarling like a fallen angel, before being let fly
to his bat-cluster
in some deserted attic or ruin
and there dream out this freeze,
carrying with him the entire weight
of our impossible mythologies.
Nevertheless, through a careful balancing, Tierney manages to chart the mind’s search for significance, with poems (such as the title poem and Tiger-Moth) seeking similarities between the natural world and the traumas of human life: “So here you have my question, mythmaker:/ Have you any news of my father?”
The sudden passing of Eavan Boland, who needs no introduction in these pages, is a huge loss to Irish and world poetry. It is a privilege, then, that she left one final collection, The Historians (Carcanet). As before, history in this collection acts as both antagonist and inspiration. The poems here give voice to Boland's distinct and developed interrogation of women's lives, and continue to unpick the strands of history's various myths and occlusions.
Boland can resort to the sort of honed clarity of vision, given in direct, unadorned declaratives, only available to a poet at the height of her powers. One of the most striking poems, Eviction, is matter of fact in its skewering of national mythography: “A woman leaves a courtroom in tears./ A nation is rising to the light./ History notes the second not the first.” Elsewhere, poems such as Rain and The Lamplighter are careful, tender and attentive to the gifts of elemental love.
The collection opens with The Fire Gilder, one of those beautifully self-reflexive poems, with Boland’s characteristic volta. It feels, reading it in the wake of her death, to be unsettlingly prophetic, a fitting close to the life’s work of a great poet:
she would say as she told me
to gild any surface a master craftsman
had to meld gold with mercury,
had to heat both so one was volatile,
one was not
and to do it right
had to separate them and then
burn, burn, burn mercury
until it fled and left behind
a skin of light.
