New poetry: Romany culture celebrated and moments of magnificent solace

David Morley, Fury; Eamon Grennan, Plainchant; Kerry Hardie, Where Now Begins

Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 06:00

Sean Hewitt

Kerry Hardie: The poems circle around absences and emptiness, moments of transformation. Photograph: Paddy Jolley/The Gallery Press.

Kerry Hardie: The poems circle around absences and emptiness, moments of transformation. Photograph: Paddy Jolley/The Gallery Press.

David Morley, an ecologist as well as a gifted, powerful poet, gives voice in Fury (Carcanet, £10.99), his latest collection, to both the imperilled natural world and to the Romany communities of past and present Britain. The result is a rich and musical collection with a sharp political bite. One astonishing poem, After the Burial of the Gypsy Matriarch, ends each line “in mirnomos”, or in silence.

The zhukûl peers and peers from the wûsh in mirnomos.

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