The best recent poetry – review roundup | Poetry

Shooting Black Air and Anthony Joseph (Bloomsbury, £12.99)
Joseph’s follow-up to the award-winning TS Eliot Albert’s music he sees his poetic method becoming more and more complex. He pays tribute to avant garde writers such as Will Alexander and Nathaniel Mackey, exploring “Nostalgia, especially sadness, / painful noise – / magnetic frequency of feeling.” This makes for difficult vocabulary when reading poetry. Continue, and Joseph’s unabashed music is clearly visible, given the beauty of the dance floors, the streets of the cities and the communities of Trinidad: “how the music fills the room, how we embrace each other until/we become a bright light, as bright as the sunlight above the mountains.”

Selected Poems in Leontia Flynn (Carcanet, £14.99)
He was a Next Generation poet and Forward award winner; It’s amazing to remember that Flynn has been publishing for over 20 years, so his poems are fresh. This meeting is a glorious return to his dirty wit, image-making and impeccable ability to deceive. Letter to Friends from 2011 is an excellent, Auden-esque early 21st century piece, worth a library of political analysis: “the daily threats brought to the Way of Life / by the man-made apocalypse / though it does not surpass the private sorrow”. There’s fun on every page.

You Must Live: New Palestinian Poetry ewritten by Jorie Graham; translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh & Sherah Bloor (Penguin, £12.99)
I have more than 30 poets who live in Gaza and the West Bank, and the work written in the last few years, these poems testify to the strength of artists, and the responsibility that poetry has to give voice and testify in times of crisis. Unsurprisingly, there’s a constant urgency: “who knows how we’ll get the love out. / Will it be on the floor, will it be in the cloth?” as Hamid Ashour says. There’s joy and humor, even when the finale is so dark, gravedigger Khaled Juma swaps a shovel for a dig: “I’ve made a business out of death. / Now we’re first in the market. / Second to everyone else.”

Pits by Jennifer Lee Tsai (Bloodaxe, £14)
Lee Tsai’s debut is a combination of poetry and essays on Chinese research in the UK: “He may not know his own language / but he can speak the language / of the colonists.” The book feels like a masterpiece, strongly expressing the importance of writing: “He wants to get his mind out on the page / and create something beautiful.” By exploring the “division of myself”, and showing the tension in understanding, Lee Tsai has created a landmark British work on Southeast Asia.

Sparrow on the Roof and Rachel Long (Chatto & Windus, £12.99)
Playing in My Love from LionsThe beginning of Long, has been changed in this second group with the focus of diction and image. repeated poems, starting from alcoholism, eating disorders and the sadness that comes from the end of a relationship, lift you up with their unwavering eyes, as in Sad Shower, after the work of Tracey Emin: “Now you are hungry / hungry, ribs on the road.” Long exposure means that the pain is not as intense. Instead, he turns it into recovery: “that dancing in the living room- / bedroom might make it better; / I add, it does”.

Someone Should Press the Record in Gaul Admoni (Strange Region, £13)
What can you do when you are lonely? Maybe you can start a relationship with the imaginary version of Brassic actor Joseph Gilgun? This is the basis of Admoni’s poem, where the central character is tormented by “Joe”, the unreliable part of a friend, a life teacher: “Be careful. They will start offering you the products that they are making for you.” Admoni’s tone is similar to Georges Perec, both in his enjoyment of modern life and what it reveals about the difficulties we have in thinking about ourselves without others: “Try saying ‘I love you’ in the mirror. / Your imagination says nothing. Pride, and book, is fun.