Best books of 2021: Poetry

The Wild Fox of Yemen
by Threa Almontaser, Picador £10.99/Graywolf Press $16

This Yemeni-American poet’s confident debut is a moving, immersive portrayal of the space between countries and language. In formal verse sprinkled with Arabic words and script, Almontaser contrasts poverty and ease, painful hunger and abundance of eating, the wealth of tradition with the starkness of conflict.

Winter Recipes from the Collective
by Louise Glück, Carcanet £12.99/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $25

Glück’s first collection since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020. Memories, absent voices and clocks speak of the passage of time, and of the loss and decay left in time’s wake. Yet there is also acceptance, coping and — as the “collective” of the title suggests — an invitation to those readers “who will know what I mean”.

Howdie-Skelp
by Paul Muldoon, Faber £14.99/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $27

With his characteristic swagger, Muldoon intersperses pop culture with a skewering of recent history, taking aim at American politics, public discourse, pandemic life and even offering a playful, unfiltered, vivid ekphrastic sequence on the visual arts canon. Like several collections this year, Howdie-Skelp also features a poem in memory of the late Ciaran Carson.

Books of the Year 2021

Cheryl’s Destinies
by Stephen Sexton, Penguin Press £9.99

The follow-up to If All the World and Love Were Young, which won the Forward Prize for first collection in 2019, is a witty, compassionate act of time travel. The Cheryl of the title sees into and from the future, while a series of sonnets is devoted to an imagined conversation between WB Yeats and Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins.

Stones
by Kevin Young, Cape Poetry £12/Knopf $27

The poetry editor of The New Yorker is also a prolific and lauded poet. Here, foremost among the Stones are those of the graveyard; a repeated image is a toddler playing among the resting places of his ancestors. These are slow poems, at once sparse and generous; windows on a world of ancestral homes and family history.

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