If first novels are usually autobiographical, so are most first poetry collections. In Birdhouse, Anna Woodford goes back in her family history to when her grandmother connected with the unlikely man she married, an Austrian Jewish refugee whose parents had been killed by the Nazis and who somehow made his way to Britain and into her life:

She unwrapped the rest of his life like a boiled sweet from her handbag,
removed his name – the German name that meant
he couldn’t open doors for her –
called him Richard, name for a man she might have married.

Though this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, Woodford clearly loved her grandparents and seems to accept this complete renovation of her grandfather as life-affirming, rather than a travesty. 

Many of the poems, particularly those about her family past and present – her parents, partner, children – her love lyrics and her elegies, are tender and yet spare. Like some other contemporary poets who were educated at strict Roman Catholic schools (Martina Evans and Angela Kirby come to mind), Woodford confronts the world anew, retaining a spiritual connection but devoid of catachised guilt. The twelve-line title poem in which she describes a clitoral orgasm is sheer bliss. It begins:        

You fiddle with the catch
between my legs until my mouth
springs open and I am
crowing like an everyday bird that has
entered the heights of the aviary. 

As ‘Birdhouse’ is the first poem in the book, it would seem a hard act to follow for its intensity, accuracy and – yes – its beauty. Yet, while not all the poems rise to that level of ebullience, Anna Woodford’s perfect pitch, control of suspense and capacity for surprise are everywhere in working order.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes also draws on his personal history in his first collection, The Makings of You, but his approach is more reserved. He seems to have taken the advice credited to his father in the short sequence ‘One Against Three’, and applied it to his poetry: “Reticence, / he said, is the best kind of defence”.  We don’t know whether the lesson a boy has learnt in yoga class does, in fact, win the day:

steel yourself and wait. I exhale,
feel my blood pump – ferric and vital
as the expression of a standpipe,
then wait for the first boy to strike.               

Parkes’s poetry is cool and unhurried, as in the charming sequence, ‘The Cut’, which tells the story of two Sierra Leonese children, nine and ten years old, walking along a dangerous old railway line to visit the grandfather they’ve never met:

We could be seen from the air, I’m sure,
but who would dare fly so close to the sun
when even the earth felt like a lick of fire?
A day when the benign insane, abandoned

to wander in circles tangled as their hair,
knew not to emerge from the shade. Determined,
we sweated in the glare, consuming the quota
of shallow breaths to get us round the bend               

Balancing narrative and verse, the poet draws the reader into his poetry with the story-teller’s ‘what-happens-next?’ A fine example of this is ‘Background’, about losing a girlfriend to another man, which ends in a gentle wistfulness: “I saw you wipe your red lips off his lower lip, the day I went home / wiser and stood by my open window, looking over Bedford fields, / while the riddled curtain you loved to grasp danced like a ghost.” However, Parkes moves beyond the personal into African history in the long couplet sequence ‘The Ballast Series’:  “Our planked fathers drowned simply / because weight is whatever we keep inside.” He has lived on three continents and in the West Indies, known both poverty and comfort. His poetry is sophisticated, eloquent and wise.

According to the biographical note on the cover of Berg, Hilary Menos runs an organic farm in Devon. One would expect earthy poems, and there are some, including ‘Judgement’, where Menos nails the specific jobs of men at an abattoir in five quatrains. She casts the slaughterers as angels:

Danny angles his saw. His halo is blinding today.
The tattoos on his arms leap like blue flames.

and ends the poem, crushingly, “If you want blood, / there is blood. If you want men, / here are men.” But Menos has a light side, too. ‘Siberian Sherbet’ starts with mysterious “orange snow” falling on Eastern Europe, and the usual fudged (ooh!) explanation by a Russian official. Then “The Steppe looked like Frozen Mango Pudding. / The village of Pudinskoye had been Tangoed.” And so forth… In ‘Bernard Manning Plays Totnes Civic Hall’ the chicken king laughs (all the way to the bank) at outraged protests. And the listed ingredients in a prepared ‘Tiramisu’ become a found poem. It works.

This is grown-up verse, able to take on the world. In ‘Face of America’ Menos uses a form she seems to favour: two stanzas of six lines each. In the first she describes Marilyn Monroe – “They had to sew her into the dress it was that tight”, it begins – but then in the second stanza the poem opens out:

Every now and then beauty steps forward.
On a shell, a chariot, a podium. Rolled up in a rug.
And for one brief moment time itself steps back. 

Venus, Helen, Cleopatra… Anywhere, any era. That is the breadth of Hilary Menos’s vision. But then we are brought back to specifics – and that poster:

Then there’s the fall, the war, the telephone call,
the men in suits with white powder, dusting for prints
and, up on a billboard, the face of America, smiling. 

My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint by Omar Sabbagh is, as its title suggests, largely autobiographical. A British poet of Lebanese extraction, his verse takes us into emotional realms that English speaking writers seldom enter. Quoting Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett and Paracelsus among others (a page of Adorno’s Minima Moralia prefaces the collection), Sabbagh dedicates the book to his father with a poem called, ‘A Father’s Love’. The final stanza reads:             

Let me remember him, immemorial
as ringed time in a tree;
let the echoes of his voice remind me
the whole way home
of where home is;
and as my eyes turn to glass
I’ll lift them up to a father’s love. 

A poem titled ‘Infidelity’ is inscribed to his mother; presumably the ‘I’ is meant to be her:
I told you a thousand times
And then blew it to you with a final twist,
Wrenched the winds from my guts, flexed my lips
And horrified you with the scaling din of it. 
[. . .] 

You would not listen, you could not hear.
And when later you talked of caring
I thought of another, less stubborn ear. 

This is strong stuff, honest and daring. A philosophical poem, ‘Hunger For The Object Far From Home’ explores the concept of family – “Family is not obedience, a blindness of rigor, mortal to the end. / Family, mine, is the way one’s life bends / Out of perspective” – and then goes on to consider “Beirut – call it home – is the blue judgement seat”. A song, apparently for a child, is inspired by a paragraph in Ermanno Bencivenga’s Hegel’s Dialectical Logic. The book’s final thirty pages are mostly devoted to love poems, underlining Omar Sabbagh’s bona fides as an English romantic poet. Modern, post-modern, whatever, he trenchantly belongs in that canon.

Leah Fritz’s Whatever Sends the Music Into Time will be published by Salmon Press in April 2012.