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 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 intergenerational trauma and motherhood. At its best, we find her confessional signature, as in The Black Notices, cataloguing unidentified murdered women, or Giving Birth With Anne Sexton, where literary inheritance meets bodily terror. Sometimes, however, this commitment to sincerity and transparency results in poems that feel like pedagogic exercises: Damaged Cento catalogues the “eight stages” of domestic homicide, while The Trimesters documents pregnancy’s upheavals. The motherhood poems, though deeply felt, risk predictability in their exploration of well-trodden territory – breastfeeding, bedtime routines, and the spectre of parental loss (“I imagine someone taking her away, / or a car ploughing into the pram”). It’s technically hard to make this new. Moore clearly presents the “I” as a site of shared, unpolished vulnerability, prioritising emotional legibility over lyric innovation.

The Tree Is Missing by Shannon Kuta Kelly (Faber, £12.99)
“I’m not sure yet what the threshold is”: uncertainty about geography and intimacy looms large in this elusive debut. Drifting between Polish border towns and the changing seasons, Kelly’s poems are invested in disconnection or dissociation, lingering around “the place that is nowhere” (train stations, mirrors, missing trees) to create a mood-board expressing displacement and memory loss. Kelly’s minimalist style, marked by end-stopped lines and unrhymed couplets, enforces a sense of stasis: “Time always goes and everyone is waiting.” While the restraint can feel prose-like, it’s punctuated by tactile details such as “a mummified frog” or “the smell of frying lardons”. These atmospheric sketches keep the reader behind glass, rather than inhabiting the haunted materials.

Dog Star by Michael Symmons Roberts (Cape, £13)
An existential wrestle between body and soul remains one of Symmons Roberts’s defining poetic drives, and in his ninth collection that tension finds urgent new energy in grief and species loss: “But these words contain their negation. / For every goldfinch put into a poem, / one will vanish from the world outside.” Attentive to humans’ destructive impact, the collection carries a “wild voltage” as it shows natural and urban worlds colliding into “a brief coalescence of matter”. A keen observer of flora and fauna with a Midas-like gift for metamorphosis, Symmons Roberts discovers kinship between unlikely phenomena: “Only the mountain hare has guile and sorcery / to stand tall like a heron in a river.” Although some poems would benefit from tighter distillation, Dog Star showcases the poet’s “ungovernable electricity”, the force of “a primeval singer with a modern / repertoire” extending his range with sure-footed confidence.

Horses by Jake Skeets (Akoya, £14.99)
“Horses buried / thigh-deep in mud / clawing for the first world”: documenting the 191 wild horses that died in 2018 in the Navajo Nation during extreme drought, Skeets channels haunted animal voices into fast-changing “mineral strata”, where a river makes the sound of “grocery store carts / a freeway a few yards east of us”. Recalling Eliot’s The Waste Land, he recreates a desert landscape visited by ghostly thunder, yet his lines breathe distinctively, pressing indigenous cosmology and consumer modernity into violent contact. “We become lightning sometimes and there/ only then become song, carry our ache, its kick pull haul hull”: each syllable marking a separate exhalation, a separate loss. The collection’s sharpest grief is found in these discomforting lines: “there is microplastic in my name / there is a drought in his”, before opening into wonder: “there is a meteorite in my hand / a sparrow in yours”.

• Kit Fan’s latest poetry collection is The Ink Cloud Reader. His second novel, Goodbye Chinatown, will be published in June.