Round up: Poetry

Published on Friday 30 May 2008 17:40

THE BESTIARY Sam Meekings Polygon £7.99

This first collection glows and hums with promise from an intriguing new writer. A product of the University of Edinburgh creative writing Masters, Meekings brings youthful charm and a fresh angle to the natural world. The Bestiary bristles with creatures – geese, seahorses, bats and prawns – representatives of a new way of seeing. Meekings specialises in this quietly excited observation. Like Heaney, with supple language, and odd but lovely connections, he takes and brings poetic pleasure in regarding the oft overlooked.

Also try: Ted Hughes, Crow

BLOODSHOT MONOCHROME

Patience Agbabi

Canongate 8.99

In this shrug and a seethe and a flicking the middle finger of a book, Patience Agbabi frisks the sonnet in ways it's never been frisked before. From gay bars to skins, 12-bar blues to Siamese twins, this is strobe lit, "a string of pips exploding". Thrumming with energy and verve, she brings the stage to the page in her tight rhythms and adherence to rhyme. She agony aunts it up to the likes of Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, all in the sonnet form of course, and the whole amounts to a confident, confluent performance from a master of 'lyrical slang'.

Also try: Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate

THE ATLANTIC FOREST

George Gunn

Two Ravens Press 8.99

Gunn's poems are "patterns of history" informed by the Gaelic and Norse duality of his homeland, Caithness. His spare, lean language is honed on brittle, sometimes brutal stalks of feeling, which find root in the past and arch forward to a future which worries him. Between these tidemarks of time, Gunn muses upon the present and the way we value our landscape, our culture and ourselves. There is a salty, windswept goodness at this collection's "conflicting heart".

Also try: Edwin Muir, Selected Poems