John McCullough has a reputation for crafting lyric poems of the everyday with a surreal twist. In Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins, 9.99), his third collection and shortlisted for the Costa prize for poetry, the familiar yet strange is rarely more than a stanza away. As if Frank OHaras Lunch Poems jumped headlong into our 21st century, McCulloughs lines sing of Lady Gaga, Instagram and house music, plastic cats that raise huge paws in a city where there are many ways / to guzzle the scenery. Please dont touch me, my head falls off, reads the sign around the neck of a huge Playmobil figure in one poem; McCulloughs eye may be drawn to all manner of cultural detritus, but he is often able to find emotion and significance. Historys peculiarities also surface: Queer-Cole takes its name from the antiquated term for counterfeit money, blurring historical object with contemporary hurt and prejudice.

How does the Sun flow? asks Katrina Porteouss Edge (Bloodaxe, 12). Its secrets / Darker than an oceans strangeness. First broadcast as a Poetry Please special on Radio 4, the books title sequence charts the tidal fly-bys of four moons in our solar system, while the rest of the collection attempts to concentrate the complexities of quantum physics into poetry. There are copious notes to satisfy those curious about the science, but the poems typically stand alone. When the little ideas slip into their bodies like clothes / They step through the mirror, enter / An irreducible level of noise. Though inevitably prone to terminology and littered with question marks, Edge manages to find images adequate to the task of describing the marvel that is the universe, at both micro and macro levels: The ghostly / immaterial numbers // Dancing all night / In the mirrored ballroom.

Another collection intent on expanding poetrys province is David Wilsons The Equilibrium Line (Smith|Doorstop, 9.95). Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker award for mountain literature, these precise, neat poems explore climbing in all its forms, from the three hundred million year old long slab of Gritstone Solo, to a tattoo of TS Eliot, spotted between Jos shoulder blades at the indoor wall. Wilson has an eye for the vivid image, allowing him to bring distant landscapes into sharp focus: the single bivouac light / on the black mass of Argentire Wall, / its tiny flame in a mineral world. He is also able to shed light on climbings unusual appeal, when held in place / by drystone walls / green fields bring / my mind to order.

Tom Sastrys debut collection, A Mans House Catches Fire (Nine Arches, 9.99), combines disarmingly plain diction with a familiar quirkiness. Many of the poems opening lines immediately grab your attention, before hurriedly expanding on a given conceit. The dead pass through turnstiles into the earth, begins Underground, conflating the mythical and the real to unnerving effect. There is a strikingly contemporary voice in Sastrys best writing: He said fucking and that was important declares one poem, while another wonders how you breathe out, like it really means something; and when Sastry brings this easy charm to candid reflections on friendship, love, loss and human frailty, the results are moving and thought provoking.

Ben Wilkinsons Way More Than Luck is published by Seren.

See the rest here:

The best recent poetry review roundup - The Guardian