Best Poetry Roundup at The Guardian

We're always on the hunt for the best reads, and we have Jade Cuttle at The Guardian to thank for filling us in on three new titles by Vahni Capildeo, Anthony Anaxagorou, and Jericho Brown, respectively. Cuttle begins her micro-review of Capildeo's collection, writing: "Vahni Capildeo’s formally ambitious new collection, Skin Can Hold (Carcanet, £8.99) recalls the memoiristic polylogues and prose poems of Measures of Expatriation, which won the Forward prize for best collection in 2016, and embraces the same interrogative approach towards identity." More from there:

By contesting the suppression of voice through colonial violence, this Trinidadian Scottish writer reclaims the shame of silence and self-censorship: “Shame on behalf of others is tiring […] flips into fury.” However, with three playlets inspired by Muriel Spark, mime poems, Caribbean masquerade and a lyric remixing of Shakespeare’s dramatic speeches, this new collection is a tour de force of theatrical speculation. Capildeo experiments with call and response “syntax poems” based on the work of Martin Carter, Guyanese poet and political activist. “Four Ablutions” gives a series of surreal stage directions, and “Game, to finish: Hamlet Oulipo” invites audience participation. The work is extraordinarily perceptive about the limits of language – “commonly accused of failure, / thrown like rope” – and as a former OED lexicographer Capildeo idealises poetic form as “infinite tonguetwister, / untranslatable in transit”. Capildeo defends the “antipoetic and destructive” and reminds us that the purpose of the poem extends beyond pleasure.

Continue on for Cuttle's take on Anaxagorou and Brown's collections at The Guardian.