The best recent poetry – review roundup

The Universe is an Animal by Jessica Mookherjee; Sleep Gate by Sylvia Legris; The Other Love by Henri Cole; Stay Winter by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe The Universe Is an Animal by Jessica Mookherjee (Nine Arches, £11.99) In this confident and capacious collection, scientific language commingles with familial histories of displacement and war. Echoes of violence, from the partition of East Pakistan and India, now modern-day Bangladesh, to an arrival in Wales, haunt many of the poems. In Waterlily, Mookherjee inverts Monet’s signature image into something far more sinister. An aunt “hides under Bhatiyari Lake, sari billows / until the men leave” to escape communal riots. Longer poems, such as this one, encode repetition and refrain into a genetic pattern of sound and meaning: “the dress she sews me is washed / with river mud from Bangladesh. / And I become Welsh. Uncle becomes ash.” Another long poem, The Reproductions, emerges from the poet’s study of evolutionary biology. Mookherjee asks how the stresses of famine, migration, war and racism impact uniquely on mother and child. She considers how suffering is not unique to the human animal only, as “ten percent / of mammalian foetuses don’t make it / out”. Death may be sometimes out of our hands, and the conditions of love and safety, too, may not be up to us. “I learned / a foetus can be reabsorbed / by the womb in sub-optimal / environments. When is it a good time?”Sleep Gate by Sylvia Legris (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99) In these sharply observed poetic ecologies, Legris tests the limits of human and nonhuman consciousness through a dizzying taxonomy of dream life. The dreams of earthworms, honeybees and hummingbirds are recounted unsentimentally with an apparently scientific precision. Likewise, circadian rhythms and pineal glands, producers of melatonin in the human brain, impossibly dictate the sleep patterns of an inanimate world of clouds, plants and minerals. In this great shared sleep between all things, we come to gradually recognise our common mortal destiny: “Sleep descends / as blood displaces air in the chest. // Sleep is a cooling off. / A rehearsal for death.” Mostly Legris avoids the simple anthropomorphism of nature poetry, in which a speaker projects inner feeling on to a landscape to cue up a Wordsworthian bliss or solitude. In fact, Legris sidelines the poetic “I” altogether, a deliberate response to the horror of mass extinction and the Anthropocene. Her poetry reads, at times, like a catalogue or list of specimens. Drawing from predecessors who also reckon with Armageddon, such as Danish experimental poet Inger Christensen and modernist poet Hilda Doolittle, Legris asks: what will outlast us in the evolution of life? Who or what will measure time after the great extinction, when “the clock strikes / quarter past dianthus, / alyssum on the half hour, / hyssop at high noon”? Continue reading...