Americans are everywhere in contemporary British poetry. The Oxford professor of poetry is American. Our two big poetry prizes last year were won by Americans. Every publisher’s list has its share. Americans give you grandeur and innovation. Poetry over there must be bigger and bolder, we presume. But is it better?
A successful TV executive for many years— she was HBO’s head of drama in the glory days of The Sopranos and The Wire — Miranda Cowley Heller now has the time and the money to pursue her own creative projects. Her 2021 debut novel, The Paper Palace, sold two million copies worldwide. Now she has turned to poetry.
What the Deep Water Knows (Penguin, £12.99) offers reflections on the liberal elite in middle-age. You’ve seen this show before: divorce for the wealthy parents, rehab for the kids, houses in London, Los Angeles and Cape Cod. “Here in our new dream house, many hands make polished glass,/ furniture creamed in beeswax. Brass gleams./ The trees are pollarded, privet hedged./ You keep your port in a temperate cellar./ ‘I promise you the world,’ you said,/ And yet I lie awake at night/ beside your shiftings under eiderdown,/ hear the rasp of your snores./ I cannot find sleep in this big house.” Boo/ hoo.
For much of the past half-century this sort of comfortable navel-gazing, in novels and poems, was what the Anglophone world was supposed to read. In the Trump era it’s a time capsule: a relic of an American cultural hegemony Americans now seem determined to destroy.
Part of that cultural hegemony involves doling out prizes and sinecures on a scale unknown in Britain. Shane McCrae has his fair share, including a Guggenheim fellowship. Reverence for such baubles inspires ever greater authorial ambition and editorial indulgence. In New and Collected Hell (Corsair, £12.99) McCrae modestly follows Dante in describing the underworld.
His guide isn’t Virgil but an abusive robotic grey seagull called Law. The grimness of sadism and body horror is unrelenting. McCrae attempts satire: an HR department (of course) and a giant orange beetle that says: “Look at me, I’m a huge success.” But where Dante included named and recognisable people, this Hell is strangely empty, except for the inescapable “I”.
Far more professional and experimental than Heller’s book (no full stops, garbled syntax, large spaces for punctuation), McCrae’s seems no less flimsy and self-indulgent. Take this from Invocation: “Of death the muse is death the muse of hell / Is death the muse of heaven I don’t know.”
Faber’s poetry list has felt flimsy for some time now. In response, they have recruited an American heavyweight, Ange Mlinko. Like McCrae, she has a Guggenheim fellowship and like him, she is aiming at greatness. In Foxglovewise (Faber, £12.99) traditional form and metre are combined with exotic vocabulary and unlikely rhymes.
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While her inspiration is often small-scale and domestic, linguistically she’s a dandy with a taste for the extravagant: “voluptuous provision”. At its best the results are rewardingly witty and beautiful. Here’s the sestet of a sonnet, punningly titled The Open C: “Now resurface, to the serene/ compact of our opening scene:/ one blue mirror shows a poreless face,/ dazzling evening’s investigators./ The other, darker, on the case/ reflects, close up, the craters.”
Elsewhere, however, this love of ornament can seem meretricious and shallow: “The Comanche departed. In the cumulonimbus/ of their dust, they took our bibelot Juliet.”
Since she won the Pulitzer prize for frank: sonnets, Diane Seuss has been the darling of American poetry. Her next book, Modern Poetry (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99), is a clear-eyed journey through her writing life, ending with a brilliant tribute to Keats, Romantic Poet — when a scholar warns her of Keats’s historical reality, like how he “wiped his ass/ with leaves or with his hand’, her response is simple: “But the nightingale, I said.”
Again, the first-person singular is rarely absent, but her “I” is startling and strange with equal doses of humour and humility. Refreshingly, she refuses to talk up her hardscrabble origins — “not/ a detriment and not a benefit” — and the beauty she finds in life is often sharp and unsettling: “Now that the TV is gone and the music/ has been hauled away,/ it’s just me here, and the muffling silence/ a spider wraps around a living morsel.” In its unpredictability and honesty, Modern Poetry is an inspiration.
