The Guardian's Recent Poetry Roundup Applauds Claudia Rankine, Michael Longley, Pascale Petit, David Morley

Aingeal Clare reviews collections by Claudia Rankine, Michael Longley, Pascale Petit, and David Morley in The Guardian's latest roundup of newly published poetry. About Claudia Rankine's Just Us (Graywolf), Clare notes, "At 340 pages, Just Us: An American Conversation (Allen Lane, £25) addresses its unfinished business with epic ambition." More: 

There is a sense of battle fatigue in the face of the racial violence of American life (“How is a call to change named shame, / named penance, named chastisement?”). The question of genre in Rankine’s work remains challenging. There is some verse here, but not much; more often she writes in something closer to a prose poem’s hallucination of memoir or academic prose, alternating between personal testimony and structural analysis. In few other poets writing today does the weight of the world weigh so heavily.

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