I dived and resurfaced with some of the best poetry I read in the last half of 2019 dripping through my fingers …

‘The Vulture and the Body’ by Ada Limón

What if, instead of carrying // a child, I am supposed to carry grief? The great black scavenger flies parallel now, / each of us speeding, intently and driven, toward what we’ve been taught to do / with death.

Ada Limón says, ‘As much as we crave answers right now, crave solutions, crave a fix, I think we also distrust those things. What we can trust is the real complicated questions. And complicated questioning is what poetry does best.’ Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her fifth book, The Carrying, was published in 2018.

‘The Binchōtan Charcoal & Its Ash’ by Vi Khi Nao

She held the woman’s face in her mind’s eye & / realized that they would never be lovers & / as soon as she let her go, mosses grew all over / the geography of her hands and the woman’s face. // Is this because it’s a debt that must be paid for not believing in somebody? In herself?

Vi Khi Nao’s newest books are Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (1913 Press, 2017), and the short story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (University of Alabama Press, 2017). She was born in Long Khánh, Vitenam, and lives in Iowa City. Vi Khi Nao holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes and Feldman Prizes in fiction and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award in poetry. ‘The Binchōtan Charcoal & Its Ash’ was published in Poetry (March 2019)

‘Dancers Exercising’ by Amy Clampitt

dancers exercising in a mirror, / at the centre / of that clarity, what we saw / was not stillness / but movement: the perfection / of memory consisting, it would seem, / in the never-to-be-completed.

Peter Porter in the Observer ranked Amy Clampitt with the likes of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop. New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler wrote after the publication of The Kingfisher that, ‘Amy Clampitt writes a beautiful, taxing poetry. In it, thinking uncoils and coils again, embodying its perpetua argument with itself.’ ’Dancers Exercising’ is from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

‘Adventure at Midnight’ by Muriel Rukeyser

cruising to cellophane islands, shaking off / this city’s rock providing lonely tours, / grim single passports, persevering winter; / the ship slides down midnight’s imperious harbour, / the gilt-tiered galleries awake and dance.

Rukeyser’s style has been compared to that of nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman. Her earlier poems are said to contain an ‘intrepidness and exhortative voice’ that make them memorable. Richard Gray wrote in Modern Language Review that, while Rukeyser had been neglected, ‘the generous and sensitive selection of her work [in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader] will perhaps help redress the balance, introducing her to some and reminding others how good she can be.’ ‘Adventure at Midnight’ was published in Poetry (May 1936).

‘The posh mums are boxing in the square’ by Wayne Holloway-Smith

This is not the world into which I was born / so I’m changing it / I’m sinking deep into the past and dressing my own mum / in their blue spandexes / svelte black stripes from hip to hem / and husbands with better dispositions toward kindness /

This poem won the 2018 National Poetry Competition. The judges said, ‘it takes your breath away – a mother reimagined into life, risen from her bed and given boxing gloves to fight off a terrible illness. The title and the set up are so wonderfully absurd, we are led smiling into a poem that hits us in our own gut with its devastating gravitas’. Wayne Holloway-Smith received his PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Brunel University on 2015. His full-length collection, Alarum was published by Bloodaxe in 2017.

‘Things to do (Heart)’ by Jordie Albiston

a. Find heart, and place hand upon it. b. Time / to metronome beat. c. Empty above of all / things earthly. d. Fill with compassion. e. Sleep. f. / Remove heart while comatose, and g. wrap / in secondary skin. h. Attend to uncontrolled / weeping. i. Inject with childhood whims. j.

Jordie Albiston is the author of six poetry collections, and she works as an editor, manuscript assessor, proofreader and mentor. She has won the Mary Gilmore Award, been shortlisted for Premier’s Prizes in Victoria, NSW and Queensland, and her collection, a sonnet according to ‘m’, won the NSW Premier’s Prize in 2010. She holds a PhD in literature.

‘The Heart Shows No Signs’ by Ru Freeman

that ends this way: off center stage above / fractured ribs the heart succumbs in silence / All is dark. Listen      a kommos sung solo / It is too late to repair anything.

Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American novelist, poet, and critic. Her writing appears internationally in English and in translation.

‘Surgery Dream (Euphoria)’ by Duncan Slagle

When she felt me wince, she relaxed / her hands, detangling the flames // with reverence. I was a child unborn / to be born again—un-monstered // & beautiful, washed in her saltless light.

Duncan Slagle is a queer poet and performer from Alaska and then Minnesota. Duncan is the author of Father Hunt (L’Éphémère Review) and a First Wave Scholar studying Ancient Greek, Latin, and Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He won the 2018 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, the 2018 Mikrokosmos Poetry Prize, and was a 2018 Best of the Net nominee.

‘Four Children, Fifty-Seven Envelopes’ by Rico Craig

I can see my mother fussing / a clot of bone from her gum. / They deserve a place to settle, rest / from eavesdropping. This ground / has a taste for lost words; I’ve already buried / three wedding rings in the soil — / my fingers crave dirt.

Rico Craig is a teacher, writer, and award-winning poet who has been published widely. His poetry collection BONE INK was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018, and will be republished in 2019. ‘They’ in ‘Four Children, Fifty-Seven Envelopes’ refers to teeth from envelopes the narrator is burying – read the poem in Spry.

‘What My Net Dragged to the Surface’ by Cuifen Chen

There were pebbles: bones of the earth, knuckle-bones / that rattled a chorus of elegies / to the bones of a boat. The prow was curved / like a collarbone, splinters choking up its throat.

Chen Cuifen was born and raised in Singapore where she now lives and works, having spent many years abroad in the UK and Australia. In 2018, she was the first prize winner of the UK’s Troubadour International Poetry Prize. She is currently pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at LASALLE College of the Arts.

‘The Dead’  by Miroslav Horub

After the third operation, his heart / pierced like an old carnival target, / he woke in his bed and said, / ‘Now I’ll be fine, / like a sunflower, and by the way / have you ever seen horses make love?’

Seamus Heaney described Czech poet Miroslav Holub’s writing as ‘a laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art’. Holub’s poetry was also heavily influenced by his work as an immunologist – a profession he continued even after he received international acclaim for his poetry. The Dead is from On the Contrary, translated by Ewald Osers, Bloodaxe, 1984. Holub died in 1998.

‘The Jewel’ by James Wright

When I stand upright in the wind, / My bones turn to dark emeralds.

James Wright (1927–1980) was frequently referred to as one of America’s finest contemporary poets. He was admired by critics and fellow poets alike for his willingness and ability to experiment with language and style, as well as for his thematic concerns. James Seay, writing in the Georgia Review, agreed and elaborated: ‘His most abiding concern has been loneliness. It is the one abstract word that recurs most frequently in his work. In a sense the theme of loneliness gives rise to, or is somehow connected with, most of Wright’s other thematic concerns.’

‘What the Living Do’  by Marie Howe

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself / in the window glass, / say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a / cherishing so deep // for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that / I’m speechless: / I am living. I remember you.

This poem (extract above) is from Marie Howe’s collection What the Living Do, which in many ways is an elegy for her brother, John, who died of AIDS in 1989. About poetry and everyday life, Howe notes, ‘This might be the most difficult task for us in postmodern life: not to look away from what is actually happening. To put down the iPod and the e-mail and the phone. To look long enough so that we can look through it – like a window. The poet Stanley Kunitz called her poetry ‘luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life’.

‘Dunt: a poem for a dried up river’  by Alice Oswald

Roman bone figurine / year after year in a sealed glass case / having lost the hearing of her surroundings / she struggles to summon a river out of limestone // little shuffling sound as of approaching slippers

Alice Oswald was elected as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, and commenced on October 1, 2019. She is the first woman to serve in the position, established more than 300 years ago. Oswald is a multi-award-winning poet whose accolades include the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2012 and the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize, which she won for her seventh collection of poems, Falling Awake. 

‘The Remedy’ by Nicholas Friedman

meaning the softness of that curve, / my attention for it. Of course, it’s true, / but more than Watteau’s willing figure, // I’m thinking of my own, on its side // knees drawn up like a child napping. / And I’m thinking how the gown // slides off down my thigh, baring the full / nakedness of my back, like in a worry dream./

Nicholas Friedman is the author of Petty Theft, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, Yale Review, and other venues. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is also the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He lives with his wife and son in Syracuse.

‘Weeping’  by Andrea Cote Botero, translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott

On our earth, / ravens watch us with your eyes / and flowers wither // out of hate for us / and the earth breaks open holes / urging us to die.

Andrea Cote Botero, born in Colombia in 1981, is the prize-winning author of the poetry collections Puerto Calcinado (2013), La ruina que nombro (2015), and Chinatown a toda hora (2017). Recognised as one of the most relevant new voices in contemporary Latin American poetry, she has been published in numerous anthologies and invited to read her work at poetry events in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Her poems have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, and Macedonian. Cote Botero is also a translator of poetry from English into Spanish and an assistant professor of creative writing in the Bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas, El Paso.

‘The Sandpit After Rain’ by Hannah Sullivan

how hospital car parks look at dawn, / how tiring pregnancy would be, / how you spent his last morning / not visiting, wandering between cafes, / looking for eggs fried not poached; / how he wasn’t himself // why the new waxwork lolls in the bed, / the colour of A4 rubbed with Nescafe, / the distressed colour of fake parchment

Hannah Sullivan won the prestigious and lucrative TS Eliot prize 2018 for her first collection Three Poems (Faber, 2018) – just the third debut to land the award in its 25-year history. The collection contains: “You, Very Young in New York,” “Repeat Until Time,” and “The Sandpit After Rain”.

Sullivan is an Associate Professor of English at New College, Oxford University. She says: ‘I think Instapoetry is successful partly because people really, genuinely like poetry. But it’s true, success is to do with the obscurity of a lot of contemporary poetry – it shows there is a lot wrong with it. People don’t understand it; they find it too cold, too hermetic. I personally find a lot of contemporary poetry very difficult to understand.’