There are certain topics that invite involuntary shudders – salary chat, literary beef, and, indeed, dreams. Fortunately, in Alia Kobuszko’s first collection Dream Latitudes (Faber, £12.99), dreams become something more than a hazy way of processing the detritus of our days. In Kobuszko’s hands they become a generative, lyrical extension of the subconscious.
The first section of the book blows apart the hinges of the lyric poem. In the necessarily fragmented quality of dreams, Kobuszko’s concrete poems occupy all parts of the page like cinematic aspects of an entire picture. Inside Me’ presents these fragmented thoughts: “Not music. // Yes, pain –/ clotted, given. // An absence of pearls.”
There is a sense made in the lack of it, which I found immensely musical and beautiful, and also evocative of the surreal brushstrokes of dream. There is a spectre of loss laced throughout the collection – My Sadness is a Permeable Membrane; Has It Been So Long Since You Crossed the Street Singing? – in the way that loss is often embossed on to all things; Kobuszko balances this deftly alongside an absurd humour: “I wheel, I whirl. I have a gift no other can see.”
The long central sequence Leaving the Kingdom has the feel of a mythic monologue where Kobuszko leads the reader through a dreamlike journey of untitled poems and beautiful landscapes.
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I came green into the morning sung up through the rain
the moss damp
and lichen
dancing along the tree branches
Dream Latitudes is experimental in the best way; not showy or esoteric for the sake of it. Instead, this book creates the sense that a reader is unnoticed and observing a poet feverishly trying to make sense out of pulling language to its very limit. A very intriguing and encouraging debut: “so I unlatch the gate of myself.”
Jonah and Me (Carcanet, £12.99) follows John F Deane’s career-spanning Selected and New Poems (2023), and pushes further still into the religious hinterland of Deane’s blend of western Irish landscape and the settings of biblical story. This fusion is felt in Towards Verse, where a “valley lies still in the profound green / of late summer […] But the spirit holds.”
Deane allows the sacred and the secular to intersect unproblematically throughout – laptops exist in the same poetic vernacular as spirits and biblical characters – and it seems that the spiritual, internal world wins out over the concrete one. Later in the poem, a moment of pastoral/theological transcendence greets the reader:
There is much trouble in the world but no diminution of hope, though the spring acclamations of birdsong have been falling
silent.
Elsewhere in the book Deane is less knowing, and the emotive effect is much greater, as in The Tide Going Out, where the poet stands “stooped under the heaviness of years” and the blend of the absolutely contemporary with the religious achieves a remarkable crest, and truly blurs the divide between the real and the spiritual. “But do not ask me to speak // of the wisdom of old men, for it is pooled / in the stony flesh of the heel, and in the heart.”
Jonah and Me proposes at points a very energising and contemporary cadence – “the millions who have gone before – // come out to relish body time again”: this impact is most absolute when the poems are laissez-faire, as in the title poem where the speaker trundles along “in a slow, uncomely dance / of bemused fellowship” with their Bunnacurry mule Jonah. In their more quotidian moments, these poems seem to address everything: “for this I was created, and for this saved”.
[ A priest writes: John F Deane helped rid me of the guilt of Irish CatholicismOpens in new window ]
Ruth Carr’s fourth collection, Catching the Missing Beat (Arlen House, €15) is a wide-ranging book that takes in ecological breakdown, overlooked lives, and the brutal violence enacted on living things in intriguing and plain-spoken poems. Women being central to her work as writer and editor, the lives of suffragettes, family, and those who historically fell between the woodwork of history permeate the lines of this collection.
The boundary between animal and human, appropriately, is blurred, to confront the reader with what violence we are comfortable with taking place. Intolerance opens: “Morning ritual: stout little bottles / placed along dusty pipes, in the curves / of ancient, hulking radiators”. The poem addresses a classmate, Yvette, lactose intolerant, but forced to drink a bottle of milk regardless. The poem’s tone quickly shifts from lacerating to self-lacerating: “At first annoyed to be your partner […] But as it went on, I wanted it to stop.” The poem ends with an alarming equivalence, “But she and you both just took it / with brown-eyed, bovine grace.”
A suite of poems follow that explore parental relationships – “Perhaps if you saw me now we wouldn’t be talking” – then, most movingly, Rescued Mare with Foal – a brief lyric of a rescued mare ferociously eating whatever food she could find with her fourth-month colt in her shadow. Carr subtly illuminates how a period of necessary self-preservation can alter our entire way of existing in tandem with other people. Let’s Think Child, at first sounding like a parent-child dialogue, has that logic quickly punctured: “will he survive to spit in the eye of circumstance / carry his story like a missing limb?” In other poems such as Have You Noticed, Carr seeks to move thinking beyond how trauma is a terminus. “I see both ways, / damage and light.”
Namanlagh (Faber, £12.99) marks the triumphant return of Tom Paulin. The book, freshly awarded the 2025 PEN Heaney Prize, is an enormously human, unpresuming and simply put collection of poems. The book mines, among other things, resurfacing after depression, conflict, growing older and various states of exile, permeated with an incredibly likable openness.
[ New Selected Poems: 1978-2022 by Medbh McGuckian - Copious sunsetty pleasuresOpens in new window ]
Early in the book, The Spare Room opens on to empty spaces and blank slates. The poet lies alone and is filled with the half-strangeness of an often-unoccupied room – “the curtains half drawn / so when I woke before dawn / and then night noticed the light’s eking growth, / it was like a bandage being torn off very slowly”. This spare room is a neat metaphor for the emigrant mindset, or perhaps a section of life cordoned off and dulled due to depression. The next poem, After Depression, continues in a similarly affecting vein:
because nearly four years of depression
has made me realise
that my body’s ahead of my mind
I’m put in mind of the likableness of Hugo Williams’ poems here, but there is a courageous austerity that is Paulin’s own. There are excellent things elsewhere such as versions of Bertolt Brecht and Walid Khazendar, which speak portentously to our current shared crises. “The island you want to get to isn’t close by […] – the whole place is running on empty”.
Paulin’s lens as a northern Irish poet living in England lingers large in this book, and the poet is continually visited by spectres of Irish history and conflict superimposed on to the Irish present – “the dismantled watchtower / between a warehouse and two hypermarkets” – and Paulin pleasingly resists any easy conclusions. “Looking out, I felt much less / of a person than I did before”: Namanlagh is a welcome, open-hearted and razor-sharp return.
