The Guardian Reflects on the Year in Poetry

At The Guardian, Carol Rumens nods to some of the year's greatest poetry hits from across the globe. Rumens notes that 2017 has been a year infused with a "sparky power surge of black and ethnic minority writers," whose work is adding to our international conversations. Let's take a look at the first three titles Rumens hightlights: 

Karen McCarthy Woolf, for example, whose An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet, £9.95) was an Observer poetry book of the month in 2014. Her new work in Seasonal Disturbances (Carcanet £9.99) is a fine antidote to Brexit delusions and certainties: London-watching and form-reshaping, unpredictable and casually intense.

Nick Makoha’s first full-length collection, Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree £8.99), was the 2017 debut which most excited me. Focused on Uganda during the Idi Amin dictatorship, his poetry is charged with ethical sensibility. The lines protest as they sing “the song disturbed by helicopter blades…” but they don’t simplify things: they explore, and complicate. Personal witness and artistry are one.

Lisa Samuels is an American experimental poet whose latest collection, Symphony for Human Transport (Shearsman £9.95), is a four-movement, book-length sequence, somewhat metaphysical in character. “The door to the train flew open” is the stated theme for multiple, delicate variations, and, gradually, the reader understands that the poem itself is the train, the journey taken through consciousness. There are many doors in these poems, and many perspectives bathed in haunting, changing light.

Read more about Rumens's favorite reads this year at The Guardian.