Christmas Books 2014: Best poetry to read
By Tom Payne
3:00PM GMT 22 Nov 2014
A swath of modern poets reflect life as it really is, taking on subjects from war to how we map the world
We want / the world we live in”: in a poem by Ruth Padel, Peter Bruegel the Elder’s critics hector him away from his paintings of “children’s games and peasant weddings…Paint us, they said, the world as it is.”
Increasingly, poets are doing just that. At least, the most striking of recent collections are taking on the realities of conflict and division, and for a moment there seems to be less room for introspective or brooding poems. For example, “the world we live in” at its most extreme comes from Kevin Powers, an American veteran of the war in Iraq. He is the author of Letter Composed in a Lull in the Fighting (Sceptre, £12.99), and he writes, straightforwardly, “I appreciate the fact / that for at least one day I don’t have to decide / between dying and shooting a little boy.” When his poems do become philosophical, it’s often to shape some meaning from the things he’s witnessed. A longer poem, “Improvised Explosive Device”, shows how difficult this is: “If this poem had wires / coming out of it, / you would not read it.” Still, the fact that it’s about something with wires coming out of it seizes our attention.
Similarly, in Padel’s own latest collection, Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (Chatto, £10), the poet concludes, “Making is our defence against the dark.” The ending is earned by all that leads up to it, starting with the oud maker, whose work on the instrument mirrors the work of Creation. His labours come to a devastating end, but Padel’s book does its musical best, not only to lament destruction, especially in the Middle East, but also to find harmonies between faiths and cultures.
Cultural divides characterise Colette Bryce’s The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (Picador, £9.99), but her response has a dark, biting humour: the irony, for example, of a Dublin boy describing (before demonstrating it) French kissing in English, in an Irish-speaking area; or the impulse to imagine “the Brits” as toy soldiers that she could dress in “little high street shirts, jeans, trainers…” She can be as wry about the patriots.
Bryce’s handling of form is versatile, and if poets are to “Paint … the world as it is”, they continue to explore not only what that world is like but also how to represent it.
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