Jean Sprackland's sixth collection, Goyle, Chert, Mire (Jonathan Cape, £13), comprises 45 unrhymed sonnets arranged in three interwoven sequences. Set in the Blackdown Hills, the poems explore the friction between art and articulation, habitat and inhabitation, removing the first person to present landscape as a linguistic event. Overshadowed by an unnamed illness, the collection shows restraint in not broadcasting suffering, focusing instead on minute attention to natural detail and geological time. The sonnet form represents a disciplined response to dissolution, creating order where language threatens to collapse.
Kim Moore's The House of Broken Things (Corsair, £14.99) constructs an ambitious architecture for exploring intergenerational trauma and motherhood. At its best, the collection features confessional poems such as The Black Notices, cataloguing unidentified murdered women, and Giving Birth With Anne Sexton. However, some poems feel like pedagogic exercises, and the motherhood poems risk predictability in their exploration of well-trodden territory. Moore prioritises emotional legibility over lyric innovation.
Shannon Kuta Kelly's debut, The Tree Is Missing (Faber, £12.99), drifts between Polish border towns and changing seasons, investing in disconnection and dissociation. The minimalist style, marked by end-stopped lines and unrhymed couplets, enforces a sense of stasis, while tactile details such as 'a mummified frog' punctuate the atmospheric sketches. The collection keeps the reader behind glass rather than inhabiting the haunted materials.
Michael Symmons Roberts's ninth collection, Dog Star (Cape, £13), finds urgent new energy in grief and species loss, with the tension between body and soul driving the poems. Attentive to humans' destructive impact, the collection carries a 'wild voltage' as natural and urban worlds collide. Symmons Roberts discovers kinship between unlikely phenomena, such as the mountain hare standing tall like a heron.
