Daljit Nagra's Yiewsley (Faber, £14.99) continues his exploration of childhood working-class Sikh experience in Britain. The real west London suburb serves as a setting for examining identity, time, and space, as Nagra turns 60. The collection evokes the 1960s and 70s, with Enoch Powell and the National Front casting shadows, while parkas, school blancmange, and cricket strike an elegiac note.
Małgorzata Lebda's Mer de Glace (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), translated by Mira Rosenthal, is named for a dying French glacier but set on the Polish river Vistula, along which Lebda ran in 2021. This ecopoetry collection is profound and informal, with recurring images of fires and firesides. Rosenthal's fluent translations capture light as 'Baltic mercury' and a runner nearing the end of her journey.
Patricia Smith's The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe, £14.99) has won an American National Book Award. Smith's passionate voice addresses the grotesque and cruel in American Black experience, alongside a deeply sexy lyricism. The collection embraces contemporary urban life, from addicts' needles to church deacons, and gives voice to enslaved women through a sequence framed by actual photos.
Rishi Dastidar's Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches, £11.99) is a thematically eclectic fourth collection. Anything can inspire poetry, from 'bullshit jobs' to Tory nationalism, jukeboxes to 'funk dancing'. The writing includes sonnets, ghazals, and an alphabet poem, and glitters especially in the title poem, a sonnet celebrating accelerated city life and dating.
Martha Sprackland's new translation of Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose by St John of the Cross (Penguin Classics, £12.99) is both provocative and timely. A contextualising introduction by Colin Thompson precedes Sprackland's Translator's Note. Her consciously poeticising yet conscientious versions retain the strangeness and burn that attracted TS Eliot and Salvador Dalí. Imagery includes 'falcon love' and a 'wounded hart' braving the 'wild wood'.
