The best recent poetry – review roundup

Have It by John Cooper Clarke; The Dodo Stories by Mary Mulholland; Red River Valley by Ian McMillan; Some Sacred Harbour by Roger Robinson; Otherwhere by Carolyn Forché

Have It by John Cooper Clarke (Picador, £16.99)
The latest collection from the original “people’s poet” displays his characteristic swagger, delivered with a distinctively northern humour. Merging blistering social satire and brash wit, Cooper Clarke irreverently tackles themes from the ridiculous to the sublime, including the malaise of contemporary urban life, the erosion of nature and the environment, money and the prospect of a cashless society, death and ageing, fascism, bachelorhood, popular culture and the NHS. His punk rock values caustically underpin the collection: “Me and my shrinking crowd / Each under our own personal cloud”; “We wish you no serious harm/ However, everybody sucks but us”. There’s heavy use of doggerel and jokes as he stridently proclaims his passion for writing. “It’s a meaningless job but someone’s got to do it / Thank God it’s me”. Overall, Cooper Clarke’s consummate performance skills in playing to the crowd demand applause as he advocates for the “blood royal of the working class”.

The Dodo Stories by Mary Mullholland (Nine Arches, £11.99)
Mulholland’s compelling debut collection explores complex questions of inheritance, migration and colonialism. “i go to the old country we’re from, / long to belong, to be like that fennel-lapping lizard in funchal”. She delves into personal and public archives, memory, dreams and the unconscious to uncover her family histories, stretching back to her great grandparents and the silenced stories of Portuguese indenture to the Caribbean. Her descriptions of wildlife and landscapes are skilfully rendered: “the three-night flower smells of pineapple and banana, scarab beetles hurry to the feast and stay like lovers”; “purpleheart, greenheart, spiny fiddleheart, and palms that walk by themselves, shift-shape”. At the heart of this richly evocative book is a moving tribute to her “exotic morpho mother”, the eponymous Dodo, and a desire for healing from the effects of intergenerational trauma. “May she receive this / benediction, an invocation to wish her well”.

Red River Valley by Ian McMillan (Carcanet, £12.99)
McMillan’s latest is inspired by his family life, living in a village near Barnsley as a poet and broadcaster in the community. These clear, accessible poems blend the surreal with the quotidian, as in the opening, Sudden Memory of My Dad Wearing Shorts, which reimagines his father singing his favourite song, “Red River Valley”. There is a madcap, maverick energy to the book, which explores encounters with people and familiar places such as the barber’s, a cricket club, a train station, the motorway, a bookshop. McMillan often engages in wry commentary to reflect on societal inequalities  and austerity in Britain. Overall, his compassionate outlook finds solace and the possibility of transformation in the everyday, where “It’s moments like this when all the stars align. / Evening games in winter; a touch of the sublime”.

Some Sacred Harbour: New and Selected Poems by Roger Robinson (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
A testament to a lifetime’s work from the prize-winning poet, educator, performer and musician. The title piece is an artistic manifesto on survival and the vital importance of creativity in society. Robinson elucidates this philosophy as “creating a platform where sacred stories – the moments that define a life and its joys, traumatic hurts and recoveries – could be told. Something about bringing the margins to the centre”. These exquisitely crafted and dextrously lyrical poems centre around Black Atlantic and Black British identity, grief, migration, racial tragedies and injustices, family, music. Robinson emphasises a shared communal consciousness, “praise for these moments of quick recognition, / miracles of synchronicity and signalled kinship”. Sonically resonant and often biblically charged, the collection illuminates the breadth and depth of human experience, where “the shoots of spring always bring hope / and a chance for renewal”.

Otherwhere: New and Selected Poems, 1976-2026 by Carolyn Forché (Bloodaxe, £14.99)
A landmark retrospective spanning five collections across five decades, this impressive volume opens with an eloquent preface, Older Than Glass, Younger Than Music, which delineates Forché’s poetics. What is remarkable about her work is a visionary ability to merge poems of personal intimacy with geopolitical realities, distinguishing her as a “poet of witness”. War, displacement and genocide are juxtaposed with elegiac meditations: “The word for wind is, in another language, the word for soul”. The collection includes a new sequence entitled If There is Ink, addressing contemporary global crises. The title poem focuses on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and questions the limits of language: “if there is something to write that would raise the cities/ from the ruins the apartment blocks hospitals schools/ that would put the cities back as they were/ I would give everything to fill this pen with it”.