The shock of the new, the comfort of the old
ALTERNATIVE VALUES
by Frieda Hughes
(Bloodaxe £12.99)
THIS large-format, handsome volume is a double gift: each of Frieda Hughes’s intense, powerful poems is accompanied by a vibrant abstract painting, expressing this prodigiously gifted poet’s visual interpretation of her own words.
The cumulative effect is extraordinary, invigorating and sometimes painful, as the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath bravely lays bare some of the pain she has endured.
One moving poem, After The Funeral (about carrying her father’s coffin), begins with the line: ‘I am waiting for my voice.’
This book proves just how triumphantly she has found it.
SENTENCED TO LIFE
by Clive James
(Picador £14.99)
MY LOVE of poetry is often challenged nowadays by what feels wilfully obscure and technically sloppy in current work. So I celebrate the magnificence of multi-talented Clive James’s last poems, and hope that his terminal illness (he describes himself as ‘dying by inches’) will still allow him to write many more.
These poems, full of guilt, love, honesty, passion and coruscating intellect, will communicate with elegance and clarity to any heart consumed with the sadness and glory of mortality.
A tour de force that makes me cry each time I return to it — which is often.
COLLECTED POEMS
by Carol Ann Duffy
(Picador £25)
SOMETIMES, I wonder if the honour of being appointed Poet Laureate can almost diminish a poet in the eyes of a fickle world — placing the writer firmly within the Establishment. But to take
Carol Ann Duffy for granted would be a big mistake: this accomplished poet of many masks is always unpredictable. She can be comical, edgy, romantic, elegiac, sharply clever, heart-breaking — and so much more.
COLLECTED POEMS
by Vikram Seth
(Weidenfeld £30)
THIS satisfyingly fat volume is a delight — from the hilarious Beastly Tales (with illustrations by Ravi Shankar), through the clever and memorable Quatrains, to single poems of immense lyrical truth and beauty, such as All You Who Sleep Tonight.
SMALL NUCLEAR FAMILY
by Mel Pryor
(Eyewear £9.99 % £6.99)
AMONG excellent new poetry published by established poets this year, it’s a pleasure to recommend a first collection by a one whose apparently simple approach to ordinary subject matter can suddenly challenge, nudging you out of complacency.
Here are affectionate but clearsighted poems about the domestic ( from cats to memories of marriage) and the human condition (‘Mr Rice’ suddenly losing his job, but retaining his pride).
Three Train Stops From St Francis Comprehensive is urgent and shocking. Awarded the prestigious Philip Larkin Society Poetry Prize, this deliberately coarse evocation of adolescent boys en route to school stuns you with the sudden horror of a terrorist outrage. A triumph.
SIX POETS: HARDY TO LARKIN
edited by Alan Bennett
(Faber £8.99 % £6.74)
THIS very personal anthology is a joy. One of Britain’s best-loved playwrights chooses favourite poems by Hardy, Housman, Auden, Betjeman, MacNeice and Larkin, adding his own introductions and comments throughout.
Bennett echoes my own (rather rebellious) feelings about the difficult and inward- looking nature of much contemporary poetry: ‘ “Accessible” is another way of saying “popular” . . . [that] that clarity should be penalised by critical neglect is perhaps unfair.’
Bennett’s selection unashamedly aims to please. That makes this an essential and strangely comforting collection, which will live by my bed.