The poems in James Arthur’s new collection, The Suicide’s Son, convey a mastery of resonance and form while dealing with topics that feel relevant and real. There is irony and playfulness, as in “Drone,” narrated by the drone itself: “I am a poetry that celebrates power.” This gleeful declaration is immediately undermined by the sinister: “I bomb air. I bomb breath.”

Arthur often establishes an idea, then pulls the rug out from under us to reveal a deeper and darker underside. “Tree-Planting” describes various tree-planters, before settling on one, “a new guy who no one else can stand.” This guy has a mean dog that he may or may not have accidently killed with a baseball bat. “The outcome is unclear,” so the poet offers an alternative ending:

  ———–Man and dog are happy,
—–each in the company
of a creature he truly loves—so let’s leave them as they are,
—–in the field.
Quiet. No breeze. The red stitching on the softball
—–hanging in the air.

This collision of the dark with the light (for example, violence with love) permeates the collection, creating interesting juxtapositions. The poem “In Al Purdy’s House” reflects that “It is strange, living in the house / of a writer who has died.” As the strangeness magnifies, Arthur delivers a thought that epitomizes the forcefulness of many of his poems:

I feel a collapse of distinctions
between the real and the unreal,
between what has already
taken place, and what is happening right now. (CS)

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Edward Carson’s engrossing collection, Look Here Look Away Look Again, also implies “a collapse of distinctions.” Here, the poet erodes the boundaries between words and images, between seeing, thinking, and feeling. As the title suggests, the poet offers a new way of contemplating art, one that is experiential and deeply satisfying.

The collection delves into paintings by Monet, Giacometti, Pollock, Modigliani, and others. The poems are formally innovative with minimal punctuation, and the ample use of spaces between words allows the reader to absorb the intricate thoughts expressed on each line. Carson maintains this approach with remarkable consistency.

Particularly masterful, “Constellations” is a sonnet sequence inspired by Joan Miró’s series of twenty-three small paintings that the Catalan artist began after escaping from Paris a month before the outbreak of the Second World War. Each of the twenty-three sonnets presents a new way of looking, in which form is present without being visible or intrusive. Consider “Morning Star,” in which the poet reminds us that this might “not be a story about morning at all nor is / it really a star but a planet at the tail end / of night.” Because, in the end: “nothing is more important than the truth of / what goes into what is behind what you see.”

Carson’s sonnets revel in the images captured by Miró. “Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird” plays with perspective, geometry, and acceleration so that the women are ultimately seduced “into thinking what they see is a / bird a perception blowing up an inviolable / promise of truth in a celestial entanglement.”

The final sonnet after Miró, “The Passage of the Divine Bird,” vividly connects a brain’s visual processing with emotion to celebrate the infinite possibilities of looking deeply:

——constellations giving new shape to endlessly
evolving narratives seen everywhere and pulling
together differently every time we look again. (CS)

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Birds also figure in Ken Victor’s debut collection, We Were Like Everyone Else. In this case, the poems shift between small, private moments or insights and larger perspectives on the legacy of history with a formal ingenuity ranging from sonnets and haiku to free verse and prose poems. As with Carson’s collection, fatherhood is a recurring preoccupation – the lingering issues around one’s own father and the immense responsibility of being a father. The past overlaps with the present, as in “A Short History of Disasters,” a list poem describing catastrophes from the historical to the personal, ending with

the mess arising from the over-reach of power,
the knock on the door, the nervous soldiers,
everything we know changing in an instant.

The dread of expulsion, fragility, and loss imbue many of Victor’s poems in counterpoint to the natural world, family, or love. “The Buffer” closes with a salve for all the “schlock and dross” of the world: “What have we for a buffer / but the ghost of fog called family.”

One prose poem, “Cold Warrior,” is a moving account of a friend’s suicide, opening with “An act of courage or escape? The wind won’t say.” The stanzas create a portrait of a Vietnam War veteran and his repudiation of a meaningless world, closing with: “your single irrevocable act will never stop calling out its questions. I think you would’ve wanted it this way.”

Victor’s poetry does not shirk from ugly realities, but rather exposes them with grace and intelligence. In the sequence entitled “Canadian Jew Haiku,” the poet expresses another view of the “collapse of distinctions” so beautifully:

Mornings in Gaza,
evenings in Jerusalem,
birds are borderless. (CS)

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All Day I Dream About Sirens (and its commercial acronym ADIDAS) divides Domenica Martinello’s thematically cohesive debut collection into, on the one hand, a lyrical modality centred on the female subject, and on the other hand, its literal commodification. Mythological sirens, mermaids, nymphs, and sorceresses proliferate throughout the poems, overlaid with contemporary “female logos” such as the green Starbucks mermaid or the Homeric Circe’s transmogrification into Cersei Lannister in the HBO series Game of Thrones. “If you are the siren, over the last forty years we’ve made some changes to that identity,” writes Martinello in a line that can, of course, be extended to include the last few thousand years. “Mythology is rife with fishy women,” and those women have survived to the present day, either objectified for advertising purposes or empowered as feminist markers of resilience and social transformation. One of the collection’s shortest poems, “Sand,” reads, in its entirety, “it takes millions of us / to make the world soft,” suggesting, against all odds, the hope for a more inclusive, multivalent form of human existence.

Martinello is arguably at her strongest in her longer poems, where she has the space to develop and integrate ideology into rich poetic diction. Images like

The line between sea
and seamstress is three
times finer than human
hair.

share affective truth beyond any factual boundary; this is the kind of image that brings the reader to an internal, tender standstill. ADIDAS is also a formally experimental collection, though, often fragmenting syntax into language that mirrors the stereotypical reduction of the female body to its anatomical parts: “lady of the lake – lorelei – a lie a lie – two thighs.” Short clips resemble slogans, but they absorb musicality, wit, and finely tuned intelligence to pulse from poem to poem to an oceanic, frothing pitch. (KdP)

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Perfact, the evocative title of Nicole Raziya Fong’s tripartite debut collection of poetry, provides a range of entry points into her densely philosophical writing. For me, it immediately suggests a distortion of the word perfect, a reinvigoration of an unattainable ideal, but with the equally slippery determinacy of the factual. In a cover blurb by Erín Moure, the title is read as the Cyrillic invocation of the first-person speaker instead, pointing out that Я can mean I. As a poetic work that often registers as an articulation of new philosophy – also gesturing back to and incorporating post- structuralist thought, and giving the work a flavour of Simone Weil and Antonin Artaud, among many others – no fixed theory is ever posited. While Fong’s writing demands a very cognitively charged reading experience, it simultaneously flows over the reader, both surfacing thought and letting it sink back out of sight again, allowing poetry to reside in “the transit between articulation and rumination.”

It is in this gap between bridging and abridging – a wordplay of elongation, connection, and truncation that appears in the book’s final pages – that the lyrical speaker features. This momentarily pushes aside the polyvocality of the central section’s pseudo-dramatic array of stage play characters, and flowers through the text in a garden of sudden roses. Here Fong writes,

rejecting the autonomy of venture, of sky
i reform into a tilting garden
[…]
in this seeking i am a rose garden
[…]
a rose is torn / beloved / hued

Consciousness resonates through her use of language, while words also fade and course, shapeshifting aesthetically from “a feather” to “a petal” to “a pearl.” Fong’s powerful debut is a text to return to, to linger on, to rest against the palate of the mouth, and to experientially diffuse as a colour palette of verbal potential. (KdP) mRb