Invisible Dog by Fabio Morábito, translated by Richard Gwyn (Carcanet, £12.99)
Mexican writer Morábito is a real discovery: reading him is like being in the room with someone who trusts you enough to think aloud. Immaculately translated, this selection covers 40 years’ worth of unusually direct and intimate work. It mostly consists of columnar, free-verse poems that track the light and dark of thought and are by turns witty, sentimental, proverbial and nostalgic. In Journey to Pátzcuaro, dignity collapses into laughter when with “the radiance / of my sixteen years … I was within a hair’s breadth / of acting my age”. Thirty years later, the speaker calculates that “All distances / were born from the fruit / that we must pick / on the next branch, / on the nearby tree,” before arriving, viscerally, at love and desire and his lover, whom “I pluck every day / and bring you to this side of the river / and eat you and bite you and keep you / and fear that you will rot.”
Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a Poetry Class by Lee Seong-bok, translated by Anton Hur (Allen Lane, £12.99)
Here are 470 aphorisms, thought experiments or prose poems from a leading South Korean poet, which meditate upon ways to make things, ways to live, and ways to find meaning in living. Noticeably inflected by Seon Buddhism – which he first studied, paradoxically, in Paris – this is no “little book” of creative truisms, but a deep dive into poetry. At its heart is a revisiting of the poem-making state of mind that Keats famously called “negative capability”: a capacity created by refusing to lapse into familiar certainties and easier ways of thinking. “A kind piece of writing is boring … Poetry is a whisper that makes readers jump out of their skin.” The book advises the aspiring writer to be led by “the underlying rhythm or ‘form’ in your work [which] has to be alive”. It takes its own form from its title: the botanical term for when flowers on a single stem open in upwards order is indeterminate because, in principle, it could continue without limit. Provocative and inspiring, this is a new poetry essential.
The Epic of Cader Idris by Samatar Elmi (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
The first full collection by a poet who, as Knomad Spock, is also a musician, is unsurprisingly full of music and returns the “epic” to the idea of a long, storytelling song-poem. The title poem is a sequence of movements with musical performance directions. It’s also a frankly beautiful search for the soul that scoots across dictions, from biblical (Babel, the walled garden) to punning (“It’s a mystery / how you teleport / telegram”), contemporary (“If I’d known what ADHD can do / I’d have sold my television”) to folk horror (“I gave the wicker man a match”), to timeless: “What is a poem if not the soul of a man cast before him”. In Welsh, Cadair Idris means Idris’s chair or throne. The mountain is named after an early medieval king, and legend has it that if you spend a night on it you come down either a madman or a poet. Elmi is gloriously the latter. “Somewhere … / between Eliot and Walcott, / a sort of neo-something-or-other”, he gives us work of real feeling and hybridising intelligence: Zippos and coffee mugs, Wittgenstein and Kendrick Lamar, and a brilliance all his own. “When I hold a clarinet, it burns like the cigarette I play.”
A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shūzō Takiguchi, translated by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka (Princeton, £45)
American poet Mary Jo Bang joins forces with Japanese poet Yuki Tanaka to bring the great surrealist into English. As a poet, critic, artist and curator, Takiguchi is a central figure in Japanese 20th-century culture, which makes it all the more shocking that anglophone readers have lacked access to his work until now. But A Kiss for the Absolute isn’t only an important cultural project; it is vivid, ambitious work. In Stars on Earth, “Birds / suffer between trees / … I write a verse / I write a word temple / Then tear it to pieces / It smelled of red roses / It smelled of gasoline.” A dark lyricism meets accelerating modernity as Open Letters to Mr Sun in the Laboratory, one of several prose poems, juxtaposes “embryology and crystallography” with Rimbaud’s Illuminations and “a Kodak camera”. A book to remind us about the potential of poetry.