In the Family Way: A Round-Up of Some Recent Debut Poetry Collections in English

In the Family Way: A Round-Up of Some Recent Debut Poetry Collections in English

The world of contemporary poetry in English is exhilaratingly diverse, but at times this diversity can seem daunting. Who should we read? In what direction is modern poetry heading? What are the traditions that help us to make sense of what gets lauded and why it matters? The debut collections under review self-evidently cannot stand for the whole of Anglophone poetry, but they benefit from being read alongside each other for what this reveals about some of the preoccupations currently animating “mainstream” Anglophone poetry--if the word in scare quotes is thought to designate poetry published by well-established houses such as Cape, Faber, Chatto & Windus, and Penguin. Each of these five books--three of which were awarded the highly prestigious T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize--draws on linguistic and formal resources from poetry’s recent past but does so in the service of a powerfully variegated voice that commands authority for what it seems to know about a present cultural moment in which new types of identity are coming into being.