What follows is a canter through a baker’s dozen of poetry books I read and enjoyed this year that I haven’t already written about on this blog or reviewed elsewhere (including one for which my review is due to appear in 2024).

My best present last Christmas was Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press), which occupied a good deal of my poetry head for a few months at this year’s outset. Her poems are so much more than just her celebrated ‘Let Evening Come’. Re-opening the book at random, I find ‘Year Day’ and its extraordinary opening stanza, with enough going on to keep my mind busy for ages before advancing any further:

We are living together on the earth.
The clock’s heart
beats in its wooden chest.
The cats follow the sun through the house.
We lie down together at night.

Having previously read and loved a couple of Jane Hirshfield’s collections, it was high time I read more of her poems, so I got her selected poems, Each Happiness Ringed by Lions (Carcanet), which, despite being annoyingly ordered in reverse chronology, has almost as much treasure within as the Kenyon book.

Sarah Wimbush’s Shelling Peas with my Grandmother in the Giorgiolands occupies much of the same cultural space as Jo Clement’s Outlandish (both published by Bloodaxe): Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities in the north of England. Wimbush’s greater formal variety made it for me the marginally more compelling read, but it’s not a competition and they are both rich, important collections.

Paul Stephenson’s Hard Drive (Carcanet) saw him bring to bear all his repertoire of poetic skills upon grief at the loss of his partner. I can’t think of another contemporary poet who deploys such a large variety of forms to such devastatingly fine effect. It’s a big, unmissable collection.

Luke Samuel Yates is another playful poet, who spins language with an artfulness which is both inherited and very much his own, and his first collection, Dynamo, was, like Stephenson’s, long overdue but well worth the wait. Like his dad, Yates has the driest wit but always with an underlying serious look at life, as befitting a professional sociologist – as demonstrated by a post-Dynamo poem here.

The 19 poems in Josephine Corcoran’s Live Canon pamphlet, Love and Stones, are all big ones, addressing meaty themes, not least the tricks of time and the joys of, and worries about, family and nature. Take, for example, the opening stanza of ‘Parenting book’:

I wrote it down when you woke me at 3am
to tell me you didn’t like ham anymore.
Only jam. And cheese. How the shower cubicle
was where a murderer would lurk.

Appearing a whopping 19 years after his debut collection, Matthew Hollis’s second, Earth House (Bloodaxe), is chock-full of his majestic, measured poems in which time and place are delicately explored. Carol Rumens discussed one as ‘Poem of the Week’ in the Guardian, here.

Vanessa Lampert’s Say It with Me (Seren) contains a lifetime of wit and wonder, as profound in dealing with the minutiae of life as with all the heavy stuff.

Tiffany Atkinson’s fourth collection, Lumen (Bloodaxe) is a book of two halves: 19 poems she wrote on a residency in a hospital in Aberystwyth and a miscellaneous mash-up including a wonderful prose-poem sequence, ‘You Can’t Go There’. I especially loved ‘The Smokers Outside Bronglais Hospital’ in which,

The nurse in her peppermint uniform
throws them a sneeze    and her ponytail swings

I’d never read John Birtwistle before his Partial Shade: New & Selected Poems (Carcanet) appeared, but I very much enjoyed his subtle, quite observational style. In ‘On a Pebbly Beach’, he writes,

it struck me that grownups tend to select
those that the sea had spent her centuries of energy
smoothing and buffing
from rock until perfectly formal, the ovoid, the oval

but our youngsters go for the grotesque,
the knobbly ones with fractured faces and funny holes
that can have fingers poked in and out of them
or look like puppies or gulls

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana’s Sing Me Down from the Dark (Salt) recounts memories of a decade of living and loving in Japan, and its aftermath back in England; a warm, honest collection of skilfully crafted poems.

Lastly, the unshowy, but deeply beautiful poetry in Marion McCready’s third collection, Look to the Crocus (Shoestring), is as fine as anything I’ve read in 2023, and would win awards in the parallel world where justice prevails. As the title implies, one of McCready’s concerns is flowers, and I would go so far as saying that she writes as well about them as the late great Sarah Maguire did. Here is the start of ‘Pink Rhododendrons’, with similes as arresting as Plath’s or Thomas James’s:

They are opening toward me
like a gang of babies, or puppies,
or wedding bouquets;
     creatures from another world.

But McCready writes equally well about family and place, most notably perhaps, in the magnificent ‘Ballad of the Clyde’s Water’, which first appeared in Poetry (Chicago). It’s an absolute corker of a book.