Jean Sprackland's sixth collection, 'Goyle, Chert, Mire' (Jonathan Cape, £13), comprises 45 unrhymed sonnets set in the Blackdown Hills. The poems explore the friction between art and articulation, habitat and inhabitation, removing the first person to allow intimate encounters with the landscape. Overshadowed by an unnamed illness, the collection bears wounds without broadcasting suffering, focusing instead on minute natural details and geological time. The unwavering sonnet form represents a disciplined response to illness and dissolution.
Kim Moore's 'The House of Broken Things' (Corsair, £14.99) constructs an ambitious architecture for exploring intergenerational trauma and motherhood. At its best, it 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, with end-stopped lines and unrhymed couplets, enforces a sense of stasis, punctuated by tactile details like 'a mummified frog'. These atmospheric sketches keep 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, attentive to humans' destructive impact. The collection carries a 'wild voltage' as natural and urban worlds collide, discovering kinship between unlikely phenomena. A keen observer of flora and fauna, Symmons Roberts demonstrates a Midas-like gift for metamorphosis.
