The sea has circled me in my reading – through whorls of beauty like Lucía Estrada’s ‘jellyfish, wide-open’ in ‘Medusa’ and Tristan Tzara’s ‘tender water of sleep offered around’ (see below). The ocean is in the poems I’ve explored but also in the novels and non-fiction I’ve been reading. I am thirsty for the sea’s pulse. What other themes can you spot in my favourite poems from the first half of 2021 offered here?

Amateur Hour (What Do Sad Songs Remind You Of?) by Charlie Clark

I think it was something like this that made Andre Breton write “Free Union.” // But his enumerations get tedious. I’ll limit mine to my wife’s hands, then. / My wife’s hands invented the word abode. When she folds them, / my wife’s hands are tighter than the onion where all time goes.

Charlie Clark studied poetry at the University of Maryland. His work has appeared in The New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smartish Pace, Threepenny Review, West Branch, and other journals. A 2019 NEA fellow and recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, he is the author of The Newest Employee of the Museum of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, TX.

Altivolant by Jordan Keller-Martinez

We search the gutfuls of dirt between us / and find an animal in amber. A pill. A casing. His bullet-brawn. Not him. His closed / casket closes our eyes to what he’d done to his body. We each have / two eyes toward the past, which turns away.

Jordan Keller-Martinez is a US Army Veteran and holds the Junior Fellowship in Poetry at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his MFA. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, Guesthouse, and elsewhere.

Sailing to an Island by Richard Murphy

Between our hopes and the island harbour. / A child vomits. The boat veers and bucks. / There is no refuge on the gannet’s cliff. / We are far, far out: the hull is rotten, / The spars are splitting, the rigging is frayed, / And our helmsman laughs uncautiously. // What of those who must earn their living / On the ribald face of a mad mistress?

Richard Murphy was born in the west of Ireland but spent part of his early childhood in Ceylon. He attended Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. Then, for some years, he ran a fishing boat in County Galway. He restored the boat himself: a revealing enterprise, suggesting as it does that concern for the objective recovery of the Irish past which is so much a feature of his verse. His cosmopolitan, colonial Anglo-Irish background fitted him to explore his Irish inheritance from a position combining intimacy with a measure of detachment: an astute stance which makes itself evident both in his manner and in his subject-matter. Murphy was the author of many books of poetry over his life.

The Woman of the House by Richard Murphy

In the lake of her heart we were islands / Where the wild asses galloped in the wind. / Her mind was a vague and log-warmed yarn / Spun between sleep and acts of kindliness; / She fed our feelings as dew feeds the grass / On April nights, and our mornings were green.

Richard Murphy, said Ted Hughes, ‘has the gift of epic objectivity: behind his poems we feel not the assertion of his personality, but the actuality of events, the facts and sufferings of history.’ Caitriona O’Reilly says, he was a ‘truly great poet of love and of the pain of love, of islands and the tug of community, Murphy is always moving between worlds; the sea’s unmoored language is his. There is no getting away from that word “loneliness”,’ Maureen Kennelly, says that in his last piece for Poetry Ireland Review, an essay about Yeats, he wrote: ‘I began writing poetry at school in England during the war, hoping to make something that would last about the lives of people I loved’. Eavan Boland says, ‘Richard Murphy’s poetry is about place but rarely about home. Often the poems are braided with a powerful sense of displacement.’

Villains by Tristan Tzara

Translated from the French by Heather Green

tender water of sleep offered around / water that pacifies by calling every blade of grass by name / childhood name / you are steeped in bark / you speak between the lashes of the leaves

Tristan Tzara (1896–1963) is best known as the cofounder of the Dada movement and author of many of its most influential poems and manifestoes. Born in Romania, Tzara moved to Zurich in 1915, where Dada flourished at the Cabaret Voltaire. In 1919, he brought Dada to Paris and between then and his death in 1963, Tzara published more than fifty books in French. Though his epitaph is simply “poète,” he also wrote and worked as a journalist, playwright, art critic and collector, historian, literary critic, and human rights advocate.

american-Palestinian incantation by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi

like an arcade claw machine, i am far too good // at letting go: you do not text me for a day and i give you / a viking’s funeral. i have learned that grief is better // when quick and efficient:/ there is too much of it too often.

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a queer Palestinian-American performance artist. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he has received fellowships from Halcyon Arts Lab, Desert Nights Rising Stars, Mosaic Theater, and VisArts. His writing can be found in Strange Horizons, Apex Mag, Mizna, Peach Mag, the Shallow Ends, Prolit, and elsewhere.

Everything Must Go  — after Xandria Phillips – by Imani Davis

to this day, she nests / for her daughters until there is nothing left / on the racks. stores enough patent-leather & lace to clothe every ghost / she left in Honduras. & who could call such a selfless love / a waste? still, my mother say grandma got too much / space in her heart. too many shelves inside of her she can’t wait to fill.

Imani Davis is a queer Black writer from Brooklyn. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, they’ve earned fellowships from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Lambda Literary Foundation, BOAAT Press, and the Stadler Center for Poetry. They completed their B.A. in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and they’re currently pursuing a PhD in American Studies at Harvard.

Medusas by Lucía Estrada

Translated from the Spanish by Olivia Lott

You let the swell cradle you, like remnants of a boat. You feel sorry for yourself, for what you / left on the shore. // Jellyfish, wide-open, circle you. Actually everything dangles its nets in your direction now. You / want to go back because you’re frightened, but it’s impossible. The secret should be swallowed / whole.

Lucía Estrada is the author of ten books of poetry, including the award-winning collections Las Hijas del Espino (2006) and La noche enel espejo (2010). She is the two-time recipient of the Bogotá Poetry Prize, most recently in 2017 for Katábasis, which was also named a finalist for the 2019 Colombian National Poetry Prize. ‘Medusas’ is from Katábasis.

Olivia Lott is the translator of Lucía Estrada’s Katábasis (2020, Eulalia Books), which is a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

Not Yet by Amang

Translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury 

There is a kiss / which still in transit / stoops to gather up its bundle of effects / the skirt caked with / horseshit and slivers of broken glass / the juices / of a beetled spring / flooding / carp frolic among the lotus leaves

Amang is a poet, filmmaker, and mountaineer who lives in Taiwan. The author of four volumes of verse, she writes in Chinese, but believes Nature is her mother tongue. ‘Not Yet’ is from Raised by Wolves.

Steve Bradbury is an artist and writer who translates the work of contemporary Chinese-language poets. His most recent collection, Amang’s Raised by Wolves: poems and conversations (Deep Vellum/ Phoneme Media), won the 2021 American PEN Translation Award for Poetry.

Nefertiti in the Flak Tower by Clive James

If there was one thing Egyptian Queens were used to / It was getting walled up inside a million tons / Of solid rock. Nefertiti had a taste of that / Before the painted head by which we know her – / That neck, that pretty hat, those film-star features, / The Louise Brooks of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms – / Emerged to start a tour of the museums / That finished in Berlin, almost for keeps.

Clive James wrote several books of poetry — a complete edition, called The Book of My Enemy, was published in Britain in 2003. Village Voice critic Abigail Deutsch noted, ‘James’s artistry lies in his ability to seem both casual and careful: He observes an imperfect world with acerbic off-handedness, often setting his informal voice within formal verse.’ He died in November 2019.

Once there was a way to get back home Kate Jennings

For Djuna Barnes who wrote The Book of Repulsive Women

It has killed and is killing many of us, / this awful haste. / Slow down / and the men that made us and our haste, / kill them instead. / Giving up, surrendering with / thinking about home / and where it will be. / Content with terrorist fantasies and gin, / I’m knuckled under, and they are winning. / Where nothing came to take the place/of high hard cries.

Kate Jennings, award-winning Australian poet and writer, died in New York in May 2021, and has been remembered as brilliant, funny and formidable. Jennings, who penned essays, novels, short stories, poetry and newspaper columns throughout her career, was among a group of pioneering feminist activists in Sydney who set up Australia’s first refuge for victims of domestic violence. In 1994 her husband Bob Cato was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which led to a difficult period for Jennings, and saw her begin a new career as a corporate speechwriter for a Wall Street investment bank. Erik Jensen, who wrote a book about Jennings, said in a tribute that she ‘wrote with a brilliant, angry, funny pen. She wrote with staggering brightness about a world that often left her hurt. No one was better at small details. No one knew more about love and its contradictions.’

‘Once there was a way to get back home’ is from her book Come to me my melancholy baby.