The best recent poetry – review roundup

Blake Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with Afterburn, a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer’s sister.

The poems' interwoven specificity and occasional nature is captivating; one feels their movement, "in the flesh, / in his memory / and in the words" as they unspool with control and purpose. "I’m still capable of being in love." Into the Hush introduces UK readers to Arthur Sze’s bold vision of the world’s fragility: unceasing iridescence and glimmer despite ecological destruction and dilapidation.

The poems often read like painterly brushstrokes, with single-line stanzas that decrescendo to em dashes and evoke a vanishing silence: "you have loved, hated, imagined, despaired, and the fugitive colours of existence have quickened in your body -".

United Kingdom

blake morrison, afterburn, arthur sze, into the, elizabeth bishop, sonnet sequences, poetry review, lyric distillation, ecological destruction, single-line stanzas