Promise me you’ll read these aloud

Let poetry be your passport to seventh-century Scotland – or Super Mario World. By Tristram Fane Saunders

turned Bernie into the wisecracking misanthrope we love.

Kerr wrote with the blackest of humour, which is no doubt why he found such a large and appreciative audience. So let me end by recommending three more books written in the spirit of laughter in the dark: Denise Mina’s Conviction (Harvill Secker, £14.99), a hilarious road trip around Europe in pursuit of a possible murderer by two people thrown together when their spouses elope; William Boyle’s acidulously funny A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself (No Exit, £8.99), about three Brooklyn women on the run from the Mob; and Helen Fitzgerald’s blissfully scabrous Worst Case Scenario (Orenda, £8.99), in which the onset of the menopause leads a social worker’s life to unravel in disastrous and liberating ways.

‘The original poem, according to strong rumour, was a boomerang.” So claims Geoffrey Hill in the relentlessly quotable The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (OUP, £20), his last harrumph from beyond the grave. Whatever a poem is, it’s not ink. It lives in the voice. Hill again: “The poem is, in part, a diagram of the diaphragm not of my heart.” That might be why, for this critic, so many of 2019’s poetic high-points were full-diaphragm performances: Juliet Stevenson and Patsy Ferran’s superb sparring as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop in Dead Poets Live at the Coronet Theatre; Anthony Anaxagorou reciting outdoors, at sunset, from After the Formalities (Penned in the Margins, £9.99); Radio 4’s adaptation of Ilya Kaminsky’s parable of protest in an imagined city, Deaf Republic (Faber,

£10.99); the hypnotic audiobook of Surge (Chatto, £10), Jay Bernard’s haunting investigation of the 1981 New Cross fire.

For The Telegraph’s theatre critic, Inua Ellams’s mythic verse play The Half-God of Rainfall (Fourth Estate, £10) had a “mindexpanding” grandeur to rival Marlowe, while Vahni Capildeo’s typically indescribable Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, £9.99) began life as a set of avant-garde stage works.

“That’s all very well,” you may be thinking, “but what should I ask the noted philanthropist and Walt Whitman lookalike, Father Christmas, to put in my stocking?” I’ll tell you, if you promise to read all these books aloud, ideally by a roaring fire. From that fireside, you can travel the world. Shiver on the

Scottish coast with a seventhcentury hermit in The Caiplie Caves (Picador, £10.99). Wry and bleak, it’s Karen Solie’s deepest book yet.

Or take a tour of Jamaica with Kei Miller, but don’t linger too long In Nearby Bushes (Carcanet, £9.99). His grab-you-by-the-collar collection uses that undergrowth as a symbol for the island’s dark side.

Or visit Super Mario World, the unlikely setting for Stephen Sexton’s If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, £9.99). The Northern Irish poet’s pastoral elegy for his mother is inspired by that video game’s strange landscapes. Poignant, playful yet disarmingly sincere, it’s the year’s best debut, though rivalled by Isabel Galleymore’s Significant Other (Carcanet, £9.99), with its sharp-eyed sonnets about sea creatures.

If you want a first collection that

Woodsong (£5) by Tristram Fane Saunders is published by Smith/ Doorstop

WHODUNIT? Police Museum, Julia Tuttle Causeway, 1988 from Miami Beach: 1988-95 by Barry Lewis (Hoxton Mini Press, £25)