New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae (Corsair, £12.99)
This volume brings together all the poems where McCrae meshes Dante with metamorphic machines from the world of Transformers to deliver a distinctly American hell. Its Americanness may explain why the cover shows a raven straight out of Poe, but don’t be fooled – McCrae’s guide through hell is a big grey robot seagull called Law: “fucking shithead follow me”. As well as borrowings from Dante and his translators, McCrae’s eclectic mind recycles Kafka in a giant hundred-legged beetle with an orange belly, a different voice calling out of every leg: “look at me I’m a huge success you / Want to know how I got to be where / I am?” It’s refreshing to return to Dantean satire, and here the poet’s target is corporate America. God, whose squeaky voice sometimes comes out of the seagull’s belly, is “the boss”, and at the very heart of hell we meet a stream of bank executives, all queueing up to walk into a coffin where their bodies are, in a witty contrapasso, quite literally liquidated – POP! – each suit emerging with “a pink mush dripping quietly inside it”.
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha (Penguin, £14.99)
Like Dante entering hell through a rip in the universe, Makoha enters history, accompanied not by Virgil but by a Black Icarus with a microchip for a mouth, and the shade of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. As we follow them, channel surfing and scoffing pepperoni pizza, fragments of the past fly around us like swirling leaves in a tempest – a Bruce Willis film projected on to a skyscraper, African herders caught up in a conflict over water, Freud lecturing on the interpretation of dreams. It’s a dizzying experience, but anchoring it all is the recurrent theme of a 1976 hijacking: “Air France Flight 139 will depart from Tel Aviv … A German will ask for the freedom of forty Palestinians detained in Israel”. The plane is diverted to Uganda, triggering a train of events that will lead to the young Makoha’s flight from the country. Returning to this primal scene that has so radically altered his life, Makoha takes us inside the cockpit, where the pilot has a gun pressed against his head, as well as into the American embassy, where people fret about the disruption to international trade, and through meditations on flight and falling, from Icarus plunging towards the ocean to the fall of Rome. “I was ready to connect history to art,” he writes in one of his teasing footnotes, “the way moonlight connects the sky to the sea. Or maybe I was just hedging my bets.”
Father’s Father’s Father by Dane Holt (Carcanet, £11.99)
Holt is part of a feisty new generation of Northern Irish poets, and his stunning debut collection nods to Samuel Beckett with its injunction to fail. Ireland, for Holt, is a nation that needs to acknowledge its colonial history and the damage caused across generations, a subject that he interrogates and reimagines via parables at times reminiscent of Heaney. In The Amateurs he creates a surreal fable about paramilitaries and rough justice, where a couple are mysteriously visited in their home, and the narrator ends up being strung up as the Captain “intones ‘Upwards and upwards travel the escalators of fate …’ / Words so beautiful, so / so beautiful I began to weep there and then / suspended from my heels”. Elsewhere the corporatisation of violence is his theme, as in Can’t Pay? We’ll Take It Away! In these dazzling re-envisagings of a state at war with itself, Holt finds a way to talk directly about what other poets have only been able to allude to, and in doing so he offers us, through absurdist comedy, a fleeting glimpse of a way out of the mess.
Hardly War by Don Mee Choi (And Other Stories, £14.99)
“We are just lending them a hand until they can stand on their own two feet. A novel idea. This is why it occurred to me that this particular war was hardly war, the hardliest of wars.” So says a GI in the poem Woe Are You? He’s talking about the Korean war. Armed with her photojournalist father’s images of children and tanks and carpet bombing, this is the great lie that Don Mee Choi sets out to unmask. She does so by juxtaposing the photographs with fragments of news items, memorabilia and propaganda. At one point she calmly describes the devastating effects of napalm. Elsewhere she uses surrealist tactics, her fellow Koreans metamorphosing into hydrangeas spouting baby talk: “I must point out a simple truth – / I’m without a bonnet”. This is not a retreat from reality, but a device to expose the colonialist infantilisation and othering that precedes conquest, war crime and genocide. This is a devastating UK debut, speaking its own faint history in its own faint language, and taking us inside a hidden war whose repercussions are still unfolding today.
Minx by Karen Downs-Barton (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
This assured debut takes us into the heart of a precarious Anglo-Romany childhood on the edge of urban society, where casual bar work easily slips into casual sex work, and on to explore the perils of state care in the ominously named Home for Crying Children. It’s not just the Dickensian narrative that’s gripping, but the way it brings different forms to bear on its material, without the least sense of strain: from support workers’ multiple-choice questionnaires to shape poems in the style of Dylan Thomas, to desperate letters to an absent sister. Add a peppering of Romany – we quickly pick up “babbi” (baby), “drom” (roads) and “rawni” (lady) – and you have the makings of a heady mix.