Cafés by Holly Pester (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Beginning with a sequence of prose poems in which the speaker embarks on an anti-epic quest to open her own cafe, Pester’s second collection builds into a meditation on the nature of desire and disappointment. Comic timing remains a strength, as does her linguistic flexibility, wielding language as a weapon in the face of exploitative working conditions, endless monthly direct debits (“Even my egg subscription is a disaster”) and an intensifying cost-of-living crisis. Juggling the demands of caring for an ageing parent, the excited desperation of a love affair, the “fudgy ordeal” of work and the possibility of parenthood, Pester’s speaker discovers solace in the third space of the cafe, both a meeting point and melting pot. “Here begins inspiration, here begins drama,” she suggests. “I order another coffee in honour of circumstantial life.” Ambitious and inviting, this confident collection confirms Fitzcarraldo’s entry in the arena of contemporary poetry.
The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (Faber, £12.99)
A slimline selection of Szymborska’s work, showcasing intimate and immediate poems that explore themes of endurance and astonishment. Reflecting the turbulent history of Poland in the 20th century, Szymborska describes life both during and after conflict, documenting the violence of war alongside moments of resilience and poignant domesticity. “After every war / somebody has to tidy up,” she reminds us. “Someone has to shove / the rubble to the roadsides / so the carts loaded with corpses / can get by.” With plainspoken wisdom and deadpan humour, these poems celebrate the ordinary in extraordinary times. Rooted in the pains and joys of everyday human experience, Szymborska’s poetry proves “The commonplace miracle: / that so many common miracles take place.” The book ends with her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, in which she praises the inexhaustible wonder of the world: “It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them.”
Volvelle by Rachael Boast (Picador, £12.99)
Named for a rotating paper chart designed to calculate the cycles of sun and moon, Boast’s fifth collection offers a pleasingly varied series of poems on themes of selfhood and the orientation of the body in time and space. The collection is bookended by a pair of poems reflecting on the slippage and mutations of the body – “body as climate – the otherness of bodies – / body image – body double – body of water” – that speak to an era of fragmentation and acceleration. Several poems are punctuated by images of “senseless war”, lamenting the hourly news cycle footage of “buildings that look like bone” and “crowds / fleeing uncontrolled explosions”. Boast finds reprieve in community, particularly the other artists, poets and film-makers whose work is woven through the fabric of her writing. For Boast, the role of the poet is one of repair: “things fall softly apart / and have to be mended”. Throughout this collection, restoration is achieved through sustained acts of care and attentiveness, just “as a deer in the furrows / might stand to listen // for the world as a whole”.
Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang (Corsair, £16.99)
Chang’s latest collection continues her engagement with visual art. While not straightforwardly ekphrastic, these poems respond to works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell and Hilma af Klint, among others, creating space for Chang to meditate on language, grief and our relationship to history. The poems are haunted by the image of a eucalyptus tree cut down on the poet’s street, leaving a poignant absence. “I learned that when grief abandons its body, / what’s left isn’t what was there before”, writes Chang, whose new poems are formed of evocative couplets that “balance the living / and the dead”. The collection is punctuated by archival photographs depicting scenes from Chinese American life during the 19th and early 20th centuries, each stitched with coloured thread; like the poems they accompany, they reflect “the desire // to connect dead things to make a new thing”. One such success is the long central poem, which relates the expulsion of 263 Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, in 1885, an ethereal piece that appears to answer one of Chang’s most pressing questions: “What am I to do with // all these seams. History that keeps growing back.”
Talk a Blue Streak by Lila Matsumoto (Monitor, £15)
Through a series of episodic prose poems, Matsumoto’s third collection tells a coming-of-age story set in the USA during the 1990s. The speaker is a new arrival, finding herself suddenly “living on a movie set called America”, surrounded by “synthetic luxury I didn’t get the wow of”. Matsumoto relishes the substance of off-kilter language, chewing on the strangeness of unfamiliar words and phrases: “Riding shotgun, passing the buck, shooting the breeze.” While her musicality and playfulness are obvious rewards, she also offers a delicate meditation on themes of identity and artifice, asking questions about how the self is formed both in response and resistance to the culture that surrounds it. “Around this time I was increasingly experiencing life as a series of point-and-click computer games I played as a child,” she writes, a persistent sense of dislocation that permeates these poems. Eventually, the speaker takes a naturalisation test in order to become a US citizen, evidence that the clearest vision of a culture comes from someone on the outside, looking in: “Now that I had renounced prostitution, communism, and genocide, I was, at last, an American.”
