Cheerio Poetry

Faber

Crisis Actor chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths – these are the watchers, not the players. The poems are awash with rueful self-accusation and laconic scepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection. The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightest of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who – in Matthew Arnold’s words – ‘has reached his utmost limits and finds . . . himself far less than he had imagined himself’.

But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous pub afternoons, cheering on and hard-won triumphs. These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach towards grace and redemption.

Carcanet

In Tristram Fane Saunders’ first collection, readers encounter a poet whose ingenious forms dazzle, even while exploring darker themes. Drawing on delicious, unconventional rhymes and rhythms, Before We Go Any Further conjures a contemporary London as it maps the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances. Sphinxes and sea-creatures, sleepwalkers and surrealists visit poems about art and friendship, poems that are ‘trying to tilt toward love’, but ‘can’t help tugging/at the invisibly thin/line between true and honest’. They discover wry humour in that struggle.

Carcanet

Swimming Between Islands, Charlotte Eichler's first collection, has its own distinctive weathers, atmospheres and fauna. Egg collectors, moth trappers, hermits, cuttlefish, pyjama sharks and bloody henry starfish all play a part. This islanded world is the starting point for poems that explore how we try to connect with each other – despite misunderstanding, family silences and unwanted legacies.

Dedalus Press

No Man's Land is the highly assured debut collection of poems by Chile-based Irish poet David Nash, an exploration and a reclamation of a place at once familiar and strange - the rural landscape of the poet's formative years. Returning for the first time in more than a decade, Nash re-immerses himself in a world of memory and language, folklore and custom, revealing a strikingly intimate connection with flora and fauna, land and seascape. Yet all the while his presence feels questioned, undeserved, his calling as both participant and observer under assault from the passage of time and the overwhelming threat of the present ecological moment. Inventive and playful, surprising and life-affirming, at its heart No Man's Land is nevertheless a book about loss – the loss of language, knowledge, nature and wilderness that affects all of us in these challenging and troubling times.