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Best new poetry of 2019: Strong year for work from the living and the dead

New voices emerge, anniversary celebrations and fresh work from established writers

Ciaran Carson. Photograph: Cyril Byrne

John McAuliffe and Martina Evans
Fri Dec 20 2019 - 06:00

John McAuliffe: My top poetry collections of the year

Ciaran Carson never rested on his well-deserved laurels and, every few years, seemed to perfect a(nother!) new style. Still Life (Gallery), the book he finished before his death this October, was another departure. The poems take their cue from paintings – by Poussin, Angela Hackett, Gerard Dillon and Yves Klein – which he describes lovingly, before they become occasions for speculation and memory: where did he first see the paintings, and with who? What has brought them to mind now, as he makes his mundane way around the house or to the hospital for check-ups? Slowly, in long, long lines, each image, each poem, opens up like a Japanese paper flower in water.

Karen Solie's The Caiplie Caves (Picador) is just as much a breath of fresh air. Adopting the persona of St Ethernan, possibly an Irish hermit stranded in Scotland, Solie's poems don't confine themselves to Ethernan's time, but his imagined situation defines the book. That exiled, attentive perspective makes us see the world anew, and as somehow interconnected, as she observes the intersections of human and animal cultures, industrial heritages and human needs and desires.

Poetry publisher Carcanet celebrated its 50th birthday with Fifty Fifty, edited by Robyn Marsack, a collection of letters to and from its editor, Michael Schmidt, which offer a fascinating account of his relationship with poets he published or admired, prompting, encouraging, occasionally hedging his bets and, increasingly, remembering. At a Poetry Ireland celebration of Carcanet's Irish list in October, it was clear how much the publisher's Irish connection matters as a full house listened to Thomas McCarthy read from Prophecy and Mary O'Malley from Gaudent Angelis, alongside Tara Bergin, Sinead Morrissey, Martina Evans and others on that list.

Next year The Gallery Press likewise celebrates 50 years of putting new Irish poetry in front of readers: its rude good health was clear in outstanding books by three poets the press has published across their writing lives: the hauntingly familiar divagations and unusual perspectives of Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin's The Mother House, the fluent lyricism of Peter Sirr's The Gravity Wave and Vona Groarke's Double Negative, whose brief, piercingly vivid scenes pack some punch: it's hard to shake a poem such as Vanishing Point ("Sometimes the van was the colour of the field.").

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The winner of the Forward First Collection Prize, Stephen Sexton's If all the world and love were young (Penguin), is a book whose ingenuity and originality also brought out the best in Irish critics, with excellent, considered reviews by Maria Johnston in the Dublin Review of Books and Lily Ní Dhomhnaill in The Stinging Fly.

Other stand-out books which offer a different vantage point on our contemporary moment include Rachel Hegarty's May Day 1974 (Salmon) capaciously mixed found text and monologue in its group elegy for those who died in the Dublin bombings. Kei Miller's In Nearby Bushes (Carcanet) powerfully draws together different kinds of absence as it tests what is meant by that ominous phrase, "in nearby bushes", which served as shorthand for newspaper coverage of violence in his native Jamaica. The Poems of Dorothy Molloy (Faber) gather together her posthumous books with Salmon and Dedalus, along with material from her archive at the National Library. Finally, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams have collected, and re-translated from Welsh, The Book of Taliesen (Penguin), now subtitled, a little clumsily, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain. Their versions of its riddles, litanies, and portraits of heroes and battles and feasts forcefully transmit the poetry's ancient charge.

Martina Evans: My top poetry collections of the year

2019 was a strong year for poetry from both the living and the dead. The Poems of Dorothy Molloy (Faber) is a tour de force, her wild and dazzling poems as urgent as ever in a new handsomely-bound volume. Including 40 unpublished poems judiciously chosen from the National Library of Ireland's Dorothy Molloy Carpenter archive, this substantial collection is so much more than we could have hoped for when she died in 2004, leaving her single slim and devastating Hare Soup.

The wit and imagination of Ciaran Carson's Still Life (Gallery) – even the title couldn't resist gallows humour! – is another triumph of voice. A series of poems written on art, sometimes while he was in hospital, recall his labyrinthine Belfast, always an effective metaphor for his complex inventive imagination. Still Life is one of two posthumous collections from Gallery in 2019. John Montague's Selected Poems 1961-2017 (Gallery) is a fine tribute and terrific introduction to another influential Northern Irish poet. The publisher always does justice to its long-term authors and on the eve of its 50th year, it continues to produce new and vital work from the dangerous exhilaration of Vona Groarke's Double Negative to Peter Sirr's dream-like investigations of science and memory.

A Cork poet who fell under the influence of John Montague at University College Cork is Thomas McCarthy. McCarthy's stunning, richly-layered Prophecy (Carcanet) appears just two years after his acclaimed Pandemonium. Also from Carcanet Press, Moya Cannon's magically spare and musical Donegal Tarantella is a highlight of the year. Carcanet, which also published Mary O'Malley's stirring Gaudent Angelis, shows a continuing commitment to Irish poets in its 50th year as a poetry press.

Young poet Stephen Sexton's If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin) is a moving exploration of grief along with a novel and mischievous approach to what is considered a fit subject for ekphrasis. He successfully takes us to the underworld through the levels of the landscape of Super Mario World with the aplomb of Dante. Other noteworthy first collections are Julie Morrissy's Where, the Mile End from Tall Lighthouse (Doire), Emily Cullen's Conditional Perfect (Doire), Jessica Traynor's The Quick (Arlen House) and Maureen Boyle's The Work of a Winter (Arlen House). Pat Boran's Then Again (Dedalus) is a beautiful mini-odyssey.

Maureen McLane's What I'm Looking For: Selected Poems 2005-2017 (Penguin) provides a terrific introduction to the cerebral, funny and conversational work of this American poet. And finally from the UK, three outstanding collections from three mature poets writing at their very best: Selima Hill's wild, funny heart-breaking I May Be Stupid But I'm Not That Stupid (Bloodaxe); Tim Cumming's devastatingly acute Knuckle (Pitt Street Poetry), and the precisely terrifying Girlhood from Julia Copus (Faber).