The best recent poetry – review roundup
Goyle, Chert, Mire by Jean Sprackland; The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore; The Tree Is Missing by Shannon Kuta Kelly; Dog Star by Michael Symmons Roberts; Horses by...
By Kit Fan · The Guardian Culture
Goyle, Chert, Mire by Jean Sprackland; The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore; The Tree Is Missing by Shannon Kuta Kelly; Dog Star by Michael Symmons Roberts; Horses by Jake Skeets Goyle, Chert, Mire by Jean Sprackland (Jonathan Cape, £13) The 45 unrhymed sonnets in Sprackland’s sixth collection coalesce into three spellbinding interwoven sequences. Set in the Blackdown Hills, a remote stretch between Somerset and Devon, the poems explore the friction between art and articulation, habitat and inhabitation. Here, the landscape is not a backdrop but a linguistic event: “a drop swells on the lip of a leaf and falls / like a word being said”. By removing the first person throughout, Sprackland makes us encounter the landscape intimately: it’s not mediated through a speaker’s interiority but in “mossy silence”, “the rumble of the combine harvester”, “the noise / of meltwater hurtling over stones”, or “the shattered pieces of yourself”. Overshadowed by an unnamed illness, the poems bear wounds but don’t broadcast suffering; this restraint fosters minute attention to “pilgrim gnats attending the water” and the mire’s “long translation from gley to peat”. Sprackland’s ability alternately to narrow and widen our focus – from a closeup on insect life to geological time – reveals how consciousness itself moves between scales. Unlike many nature poems that overanimate or sentimentalise, the book is alive to the limits of human agency: it knows “language itself is prone to collapse”. Yet in that collapse, we can find meaning; recognise the “spiky logic” of natural process, following it as “the sparrow enters / and follows” the “sprawling holly”. The unwavering sonnet form represents an act of courage, a disciplined response to illness and dissolution, creating order where language threatens to collapse. This is a profound, enduring collection. The House of Broken Things by Kim Moore (Corsair, £14.99) Moore’s new collection constructs an ambitious architecture for exploring int…