In the coming year, I don’t know if I will read so many collections or spend time with so many illustrations, but I have enjoyed my 2022 reading so far (partially discussed last week, here).

Ai Qing’s Selected Poems (2021), translated by Robert Dorsett, are “characterized by his sincerity, a powerful tool for resisting autocracy and oppression,” writes his son, Ai Weiwei, in the introduction. “The existence of poetry is proof that the soul cannot be conquered, that no matter when and where, poetry comes the closest to reflecting inner truth, and the creation of another accepted truth is subversive to the desert of power: independent and unruly, as an unyielding existence, poetry is salvation.”

Dorsett observes Ai Qing’s “deep and personal passion, a genuine love for human beings, and pity for the oppressed, a pity that, combined with profound lyricism, reaches deep into the heart of the reader.” This collection is one that I enjoyed reading from beginning to end, but over time. One of my favourites was “Trees” from spring 1940.

One tree. Another tree.

Stand distant, alone.

Wind, air,
inform their isolation.

But under cover of mud and dirt
their roots reach
into depths unrevealed,

entwine unseen.

The central concept in Mira Jacob’s Good Talk (2018) is this: “Sometimes you don’t know how confused you are about something important until you try explaining it to someone else.” It’s a relatable concept and the story immediately took hold, with the opening scenes of a mother answering questions for her young son (say, about Michael Jackson’s change in skin colour). At times, a graphic memoir seemed the perfect choice; it’s cool to have drawings of two people talking with, for instance, a map in the background, to remind readers that these people have roots in different places.

Mostly the figures look directly at the reader, which means you feel included, even when the talk is intimate (a series of her lovers in college, say). When I flipped just a few pages, I enjoyed it, but it felt like a story best enjoyed in a serial format. When I sat longer with the story, I wanted more from the scenes; I wanted the talk to be more words and fewer pictures. Because it’s a story about conversations we have, don’t have, should have, long to have, wish we hadn’t had, and never had.

Monica Minott’s Kumina Queen (2016) made me smile with its side-eye poem to Columbus and his “discoveries”, and the eighty-nine-year-old woman at the heart of “Dance, Girl, Dance.” The corners of my mouth turned down, on reading “Mama Said There Would Be Days Like This” wherein “fireflies no longer / light the night sky” and “East Indian Mangoes no longer sweet.”

Her poems are about family history and home, work and love, hummingbirds and gardens. They contain quintessentially Jamaican language, with vocabulary (like, “irie”) and syntax (“But why my Caribbean scribe / should write we down so”). They are often short poems, and when I see that her biography mentions she is a chartered accountant, I imagine her working and reworking a poem on a notepad positioned to one side of the kind of balance-sheet that I studied in school: ordering and coordinating, exact and succinct.

In Minott’s “Sister Bernice” I find: “But it was a haunting, this compulsion—I had to dance.” Which takes me to my reread of Shivanee Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017). It was on the shelf when I was looking for Minott, and I couldn’t just leave it there, obviously. Everyone Knows I Am a Huge Fan of NovelNiche. There’s a mythic feel to these poems but, just when I think the ideas are too expansive for me to properly absorb, there’s a tangible detail that tugs me close, like listening to Tracy Chapman in “Fatherhood.”

These are poems for powerful women, for women who long to more fully realise their own power. “Never give a woman more sadness than she needs. From this fabric, from this persistent earth, she will wrangle greater things than men can fathom.” This is from “The Abortionist’s Daughter Declares her Love,” one of a series of poems in the collection’s first part. There are many allusions to other inheritances and hauntings, like Lilith: “We love her; we just / don’t want the same things she did. / That’s all.” And, fittingly, there are acknowledgments of the importance of storytelling:  “There lies an ache / in the place I was ransacked. Only this poem knows it.”

In Colin Robinson’s “The Man Who Flew”, writing is a vital part of his existence: “I crossed water and waited / at the ridge of the sea my notebook open / like my arms my scissors and pencil drawn.” There are poems for his lovers  Tim and Jermaine 9and more) and political poems and poems about lovemaking that are political too, for their insistence and declarative tone.

Unsurprisingly, in a collection named You Have You Father Hard Head (2016), there are thoughts on fatherhood, on masculinity, and other relationships: “I have no name to call my father back / across years distance / the absence of a childhood.” And in a startling but overwhelmingly satisfying moment of kismet, the poem “Writing Is an Arsenal” was inspired by Shivanee Ramlochan’s work: “Writing is an arsenal / she wrote / In hers a needle / to suture fresh wounds / with a thread of words.”

Raymond Ramcharitar was born in Trinidad and some of the poems in American Fall (2007) do reflect that; others, however, allude to experiences in Boston and Miami; and others still feel suspended, beyond time and place, mythic and conceptual. It’s a slim collection, about fifty pages, but each work feels as though it should be studied and contemplated; nothing felt inaccessible on the surface, but the structures and tone seem formal somehow, whether a found poem or a villanelle (no, I couldn’t define that either, not without investigating).

There’s also dialogue and slang, ordinary subjects, like train tracks, among the elevated themes, like “Ishmael” which opens with an epigraph from the Bible. But even though I felt as though I was overlooking the intricacies and delicacies of his work, I still enjoyed reading it; I immediately checked the library catalogue to see if I could request more of his poems (and, it turns out, short stories too).

Esther Phillips’ poems in Leaving Atlantis (2015), however, felt like reading Mary Oliver poems. The allusions (to Caliban or Lazarus) are casually inserted, as though part of conversations with friends. The language is comfortably elevated: a tempest rather than a storm, a faithfulness rather than loyalty: slight shifts in word choice for a satisfying nuance.

Whether a poem written for a birthday or in the wake of a death, these verses are filled with recognisable and universal emotions. I kept wanting just one more, the way that you want another cup of tea because it’s warm and soothing, and the strong women here could have a drink with the strong women in Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting too.

Maxine Tynes also writes poems about being wounded, about living among the wounded: “her footprints / a hieroglyph of purple wound and query.” The Door of My Heart (1993) is her fourth collection, with poems drawn from her daily life in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. She writes about her use of a cane and musings on mobility (along with thoughts on teaching and belonging, protest and resistance. “I surge to a rude awakening / to pluck feathers and sleepdust / from these eyes / so fresh from dreams / of dogs and presidents.” She was in my stack last year, too, with Woman Talking Woman.

Tynes’ Save the World for Me (1991) is a collection for children; it reminded me of browsing the poetry shelves when I was a girl. The stacks were places I normally visited only when I had a school project, with two exceptions: fairy tales and poetry. Here, too, Tynes’ poems are little rhyming stories, about being late for school (“The Trick of the Clock”) and a child who’s too old to admit the importance of a favourite teddy bear (“A Best and Furry Secret Friend”). These are all about the rhymes and, at the end, there is a section about the author which considers some autobiographical details and thoughts on why one writes.

Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed (2021) was one of my favourite reads last year, so Counting Descent (2016) was soon in my stack. Sometimes you just know, even when you’re reading their prose, that the poetry an author will produce will be every bit as satisfying (even if you’re not a confident poetry reader). It’s the way that he observes detail, his perspective on how past and present align and collide (which is at the heart of his recent volume of non-fiction), how ideas constellate.

Smith has a way of relating personal experience that invites you to reflect on your own, as though you are having a quiet conversation together, trying to make sense of things that have passed. He often writes about persecution and exploitation, about prejudice and injustice, but there is an undercurrent of humour and irony in his work, the kind that results in a poem called “How to Fight” being about spelling bees in school.

Spelling bees were a battleground
where teachers trained me
to wield language as a
tool & fist & weapon & warning
to those who would rather
make an outline of me.

Have you read any graphic novels or memoirs this year that stood out for you?
What’s the last poetry collection that has nestled in your stacks?