Collected Poems by Wendy Cope (Faber, £20)
Nearly 40 years after Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis catapulted Cope to fame, here’s a chance to revel in the work of one of our greatest poets. Favourites like The Orange, After the Lunch and the sonnets of her flailing parodist Strugnell delight anew, while some of the previously uncollected poems are so good you wonder why they haven’t surfaced before. Take Depression: “I can no more cross this room / Than Zeno’s arrow.” Her poetry stands unsurpassed in its popularity and technical accomplishment – there’s no better contemporary writer of forms such as the triolet – and in the wit, acuity and seriousness of purpose with which she shows us what it is to be human.
Eat the World by Marina Diamandis (Canongate, £16.99)
Diamandis, a musician, describes the poems in her debut collection as “strange stories” that refused to become songs. The persona-driven approach that has informed many of her lyrics is used here, the character an unmoored rock star. The pose works best when hitting a note of self-mocking awareness, such as in Pink Elephant: “Can somebody save me? / You’re not meant to say that, though. / You’re meant to say ‘Only I can save myself!’” There’s brilliant phrasemaking (“the thin fizz of desperation”) and sharp observations (the purpose of emotions “is to move, be felt / as energy in motion”) throughout, but a tendency to overexplain softens the bite.
Unwritten Woman by Hannah Lavery (Polygon, £10.99)
The women of Lavery’s latest collection were first seen in the margins of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Through cooks, mothers, maids and “the madwomen / who have / always known”, we see the damage men do as Lavery makes the monster into a symbol of misogyny: “for it is Evil the men think / they see in him / but in truth / it is only themselves”. In these and later poems that take a satirical swipe at the self-importance of the theatre (“… the fifth emergency service. / Are we sure?”), Lavery expertly directs our attention to what we should see but choose not to: “she told you she was uncomfortable … Her words in plain sight.”
Agimat by Romalyn Ante (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
“We are running in slow motion, / our chests brown and blue fabrics torn open.” Ante’s second collection is rooted in her experience as an NHS nurse during Covid. She is unflinching in detailing the physical and emotional exhaustion of that labour, and also delivers deft political commentary as her alter ego Mebuyan, a Filipino goddess of the underworld: “this poem is a catalogue of what is missing / dopamine serotonin aprons / masks gloves”. As she moves between the Philippines and the Midlands, and touches on her relationships with her family and partner, what unites the poems is her simple, beautiful language, and an awareness of the difficulty of healing: “As the hour deepens, I wonder how far / this heart can listen.”
Monster by Dzifa Benson (Bloodaxe, £12.99)
Also giving voice to the previously silent is the first collection by playwright and multimedia artist Benson. Here it’s the black female body, and in particular Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”, that channels Benson’s dazzling ventriloquism: “Now I languish in salons, fairgrounds and roadside inns / where trolls with their yeast stink jostle to see this stuffed skin / mark time in a floor-show.” The tactile language and eclectic techniques take the breath away, with the book featuring playlets, remixes of quotes from Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, even a poem layered on to a reproduction of a fragment of a genome. Imaginative, rigorous and playful, this is a showstopper of a debut.