2025 has been an absolutely vintage year for poetry; month by month so much utterly joyful stuff has been appearing on the shelves. (And not just books! Two new poetry magazines have launched, both by their second issue indispensable: Free Bloody Birds and The Little Review.) Ange Mlinko has finally been properly published in the UK, and her Foxglovewise is just as good as readers of the LRB, where many of the poems first appeared, will have been hoping; Imogen Cassels’ Silk Work is a completely achieved debut collection from one of the most exciting young poets currently writing; Luke Kennard’s Book of Jonah is generous and hilarious, his best book yet – but look all of the books on this list are bangers. Anyway, my book of the year is Gillian Allnutt’s lode; taut, humane lyrics, touching on Corona-times, the North East of England, the second world war, the homely and the numinous – and transforming everything it touches. It’s an astonishment, a poet at the very peak of her powers.
From the publisher:
The lode in Gillian Allnutt’s title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and…
From the publisher:
The UK debut of a celebrated American poet whose work is as lyrical as it is radical. Foxglovewise is complex but inviting, profound but wry. It is firmly contemporary while also being in lively conversation with deep histories: 'Where do…
From the publisher:
Drawing on Romany language, storytelling and the speech of birds, award-winning poet David Morley offers a provocative and passionate invitation to reflect afresh on the ways in which the lives, stories and fate of humans – and the…
From the publisher:
A career retrospective from one of Britain's finest poets of the natural world.Recipient of the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry 2024Jen Hadfield is increasingly recognized as one of the singular poetic voices of our time, admired for the…
From the publisher:
Exploring translations, folksongs and geographies of longing.In Silk Work, Imogen Cassels’ debut collection, desire and grief are a double-edged subject, elucidated through a kind of lyric diffidence. Forms, translations,…
From the publisher:
Punctuated by rhyme and shaped by traditional forms, the poems in Small Pointed Things turn encounters with the natural world and scenes from family life into acts of self-discovery. Poignant and funny in equal measure, many of these poems…
From the publisher:
A blisteringly funny new collection from the Forward Prize-winning author of Notes on the Sonnets.‘Kennard’s distinctive voice – surreal, funny, anxious, always overthinking, and cringingly self-deprecating –…
From the publisher:
Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2025Wellwater demonstrates a poet writing at the height of her powers. In poems that are supple, philosophical, bracingly honest and ribbed with erudition, Wellwater conducts a…
From the publisher:
Measures of Weather is about more than just weather. What isn’t weather? Weather here is a stand-in, for the elemental, the transitional, the ungovernable. And what does it mean to measure? To find intersections. To articulate…
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