What is poetry for, in an age of relentless noise? Is it a quiet refuge, a place to hide from the storm? Or is it a lens, a way of looking so intently at the world that its hidden fractures, its beautiful, violent histories, are brought into sharp, unnerving focus? Creativitys.UK will tell you about a remarkable slate of new collections from some of the most vital voices in British and Irish poetry, a body of work that collectively argues for the latter. These poets are not escaping. They are excavating. They are treating the landscapes of memory, nationhood, and the self as archaeological sites, digging down to reveal the ghosts that lie just inches beneath the soil.
From the raw, physical grief of Mona Arshi to the planetary anxieties of Robert Crawford, these collections are united by a fascination with haunted ground. They understand that no landscape, whether it’s a rural Irish farm or the architecture of a sentence, is ever truly empty. It is a palimpsest, written over with stories of loss, injustice, and survival. To read these books is to be reminded that poetry’s most urgent task is not to soothe, but to bear witness.
The archaeology of grief
In some of these collections, the haunting is intensely personal, a violence that has erupted within the family and now colours the entire world. Mona Arshi’s magnificent and harrowing Mouth begins with an image of such brutality – a tongue bitten out, a head hacked off – that it forces the reader immediately into a space of visceral witnessing. This is a book about the violence of language, and the violence of its absence. The first section is a landscape of domestic terror: drowning, bullying, loss. Only later do we understand this as a prelude, a preparation for the book’s devastating core, a sequence in which the poet’s mourning for her brother is braided with the ancient grief of Antigone. It is a work that refuses to sanitise mourning, forcing open the space it truly needs.
This fusion of the personal and the political, the private wound and the public history, is echoed in Fawzia Muradali Kane’s Guaracara. Kane, an architect by trade, understands that places are built from memory and trauma. Her collection is named for a river in south Trinidad, and its prose poems are intoxicating snapshots of a rural childhood lived between the “iridescent, slow moving” polluted water and a shanty town known as The Line. But this idyll is haunted. It is haunted by the polio epidemic that “closed the islands down in 1971 and ’72,” and it is haunted by a deeper, more foundational violence. In the book’s furious central sequence, written in Trinidadian Creole, she addresses the history of the plantations. The landscape of childhood is revealed to be built on the bones of King Sugar, a ghost that can never be truly exorcised.
The ghosts in the fields
This sense of a haunted national landscape is explored with a quieter, more valedictory sadness by two of Ireland’s finest poets. Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Anchorage is a masterly collection of portraits of rural farming life, steeped in a deep, unsentimental humanity. In ‘Walking the Land’, he lovingly lists the old Gaelic field names of the family farm as it is sold off in “that cold March of 1962,” the names meaning nothing to the “shrewd and thoughtful men” who have come to buy it. The poem is an act of preservation, an attempt to map a world just as it vanishes. O’Donoghue shows how kindness and community can endure, but he is unflinching about what cannot be repaired: the “chained dog burned along with the barn” in a fire. It is a devastating, unforgettable image of the casual brutality that coexists with neighbourly love.
Moya Cannon, in Bunting’s Honey, offers a similarly intimate, and similarly haunted, vision of the Irish landscape. Her seventh collection is rooted in Galway, a place she knows with the precision of a lover. She captures the “blurry, summery sway” of a July meadow with breathtaking delicacy. But this is not sentimental nostalgia. Cannon is acutely aware of the violence that has shaped this beautiful place. Her poems are populated by the ghosts of starvation and emigration, of the workhouse, and of “the three girls in my year / who didn’t return to school.” She reminds us that even in a landscape of holy mountains and silver-rimmed lochs, the real story is one of human suffering.
A future turning to ruin
If the Irish poets are haunted by the past, the great Scottish poet Robert Crawford is haunted by the future. His first collection in seven years, Old World, is a work of immense intelligence and ecological sensitivity. The landscape he excavates is the entire planet, and the ghost is the looming spectre of climate crisis. This is poetry as an early warning system. He uses literary games and allusions not as a formal exercise, but as a desperate attempt to find a new language for an unprecedented catastrophe.
He plays with fonts, turning classical archetypes like Sisyphus and Prometheus inside out, as if to say our old myths are no longer fit for purpose. He rewrites Eliot’s The Waste Land as The West Land, a lament for a world choking on its own consumption. In a brilliant central sequence, he uses 66 haiku – one for each year of his life – to count down the planet’s path to destruction. It is a work of profound anxiety, yet it is not without hope. Life, he suggests, and poetry, do go on, even if it is in a world of “Obsolete Broken Angels.”
A fast and furious now
Finally, there is the exhilarating, chaotic, and utterly contemporary landscape of Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s debut, Joy Is My Middle Name. Published by the standard-bearers of the UK’s experimental scene, Fitzcarraldo Editions, this is a different kind of haunting altogether. The landscape here is North American life itself, a place haunted by its own absurdity, its racist monuments, and the vapid rituals of the middle class, like “people … at the farmers’ market being very specific / about their mushroom selection.”
Debevec-McKenney’s poems are, as one title suggests, fast and furious. They are smash-and-grab raids on pop culture, sexy, exciting, and often screamingly funny. Where the other poets in this roundup respond to their haunted worlds with elegy and quiet contemplation, Debevec-McKenney responds with a vibrant, ranting, and joyous exorcism. It is a brainy, brilliant, and utterly refreshing new voice.
Together, these collections paint a powerful picture of where poetry is now. It is a place of deep engagement, of critical memory, and of profound moral seriousness. These poets are not looking away. They are looking closer, digging deeper, and reminding us that the ground beneath our feet is never as solid as it seems. It is alive with the beautiful, violent ghosts of everything that came before.
