There is something delightfully wacky about the familiar Christmas carol The Twelve Days of Christmas. From its opening gift of a partridge in a pear tree to the concluding twelve drummers drumming, the lyrics have a pleasingly cumulative effect. It’s a fun counting song for children, but there’s also a great deal going on poetically – surprising images, interesting juxtapositions, alliteration, assonance, half-rhyme, structural repetitions, and clever metrical variations.

2023 has been a dread-full year, for all sorts of well-documented reasons – but it’s been a stellar year for poetry. Over the past twelve months I’ve bought and read a lot of poetry books, partly to support small independent presses but mostly because there have been so many interesting and excellent books to enjoy. It’s been my pleasure to endorse two brilliant collections: I Imagine an Image by Teo Eve and Scrabblegrams by David Cohen, both published by Penteract Press. If they’re not already on your bookshelves, they should be.

(My own collection, Triangles, was published last April by Penteract Press and I would be very happy if it had a place on your bookshelf too 😊.) 

What other reading would I recommend for you this year? Taking inspiration from the Christmas carol, I’ve compiled a list of my twelve books of Christmas. As with the carol, or the best boxes of chocolates, there’s a wide assortment: formal poetry, visual poetry, free verse, constrained poetry, concrete and hybrid poetry, all covering a range of themes by poets from around the globe. Every book has its own music, and I’ve learned something new from each one. 

Here are my twelve books of Christmas, listed (rather prosaically) in alphabetical order by surname:

1. The Sleeping Place by Susie Campbell and Rose Ferraby (Guillemot Press)

A hybrid meditation on place, time, death and burial, and the articulation of meaning beyond words and language – layered and complex, moving and profound, with its own haunting melody. 

2. The Robots of Babylon by Anthony Etherin (Penteract Press)

Anthony Etherin is a master magician of wordplay, and it’s easy to be dazzled by the brilliance and range of his craftsmanship. Above all, however, I was struck by the sheer sense of joy in language’s capabilities that infuses the book, and the deftness with which he can make constraints sing. Here’s the third poem in the sequence “The Interstellar Wild”: 

We speak of the interstellar wild:
These hallowed sidereal lights
seem alone in the clearing.
Gentle and obedient, each glint’s
eternal glow belies the raging ––
where black holes dispel the starlight, 
deep and covert in the lethal night.

(This is a homovocalism – note the sequence of vowels in each line.) Read the poems in this collection aloud. Listen to their music.

3. concrete in the parallelogram by Mike Ferguson (Gazebo Gravy Press)

Mike Ferguson’s collection is a visual and verbal treat. This is concrete poetry at its best, witty and thought-provoking, where the white space and layout on the page contribute just as much to meaning as the words in each poem. 

4. Imaginary Sonnets by Daniel Galef (Word Galaxy Press)

Daniel Galef’s debut collection is a sonnet sequence of biographies and anecdotes, mainly written in the form of dramatic monologues with unusual or surprising perspectives. We lament at the unrequited love between two parallel lines; eavesdrop on Penelope addressing her loom as she awaits the return of Odysseus; learn about the 19^th century Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis; and discover that Tesana is the Etruscan name for the goddess of the dawn.  The sonnets are beautifully crafted, sparkling with wit, imagination and elegant succinctness. Here are the opening lines of “A Salmon to the Sea”:

The sun is setting, the jeweled world set aflame
with the fire and with the jewels that burn in me:
a silver meteor in a sunlit sea
like twin mirrors reflecting back the same
pink and gold and gold and gold and pink 
in infinite return.

5. Seasons in the Sun by Annest Gwilym (Gwasg Carreg Gwalch)

Nature and seasonal changes are at the heart of this collection by Welsh poet Annest Gwilym, in which personal narratives are woven into powerful evocations of place and landscape. Rich in sensory imagery, the poems delicately convey emotional nuances and the imprint of presence – physical, historical and mythological – through shifts in time. 

6. Seeing in Tongues, edited by James Knight (Steel Incisors)

This absolute unit of an anthology showcases the best of contemporary visual poetry. Work by all my favourite vispo artists is included – Gary Barwin, Laura Kerr, Robert Frede Kenter, Richard Carter, Richard Biddle, Maggs Vibo, Michelle Moloney King, David Read, Imogen Reid and James Knight himself, to name but a few – as well as many others whom I hadn’t come across before and whose work I intend to explore further. It’s a glorious deep dive into form, colour and technique, available both as a print book and in downloadable pdf form. (I originally bought the pdf version, and enjoyed it so much that the print version has now sneaked its way on to my Christmas wish list.)

7. How to Navigate our Universe by Mary Soon Lee (Amazon)

I thoroughly enjoyed Elemental Haiku, Mary Soon Lee’s first collection, and this, her second collection, is equally delightful. Lee celebrates our ongoing quest to explore and understand the universe in poems that are characterised by humanity, insight, wisdom, and a profound sense of wonder. She wears her erudition lightly, treating us to unexpected images and a sprinkling of humour, as when she instructs us how to speak to Pluto:

Address him as Sir or Pluto, 
never by minor-planet designation.

Avoid the terms planet or dwarf;
he is more than his classification.

Ask after his moons, their moods,
his long slow dance with Neptune.

There are eloquent tributes to pioneers of space exploration: to Galileo, for example, mapping ‘the mountains of the Moon’; to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, meticulously noting ‘the facts on Cepheids remote’; and to Jocelyn Bell Burnell,

opening the door to physics
to those who could not enter.

The final poem in the collection is a tender affirmation of the transcendent power of love. The book is listed on the Amazon website as being suitable for ages 8 –18, but it’s equally appealing to adults.

8. Stovetop Ghosts by Katy Naylor (Femme Salvé Books)

A contemporary take on the mediaeval concept of a book of hours, Stovetop Ghosts charts the experience of being at home with small children, through a progression of everyday events: blowing a dandelion clock, making a batch of pancakes, chanting a nursery rhyme. Time stretches and shrinks; shadows lurk at the edge of the forest and in the ocean’s alluring chill; past, present and future intertwine in these delicately layered, astutely observed and beautifully written poems. The accompanying illustrations by Stuart Buck add to the book’s charm.

9. Murder by (Loco)motive by George Pestana (Amazon)

This book consists of a word-unit palindrome, presented in its entirety at the beginning, followed by a series of AI-generated images paired with the word-triples, and the single pivot word (‘light’), that together make up the poem. The effect is surreal and intriguing, causing us to slow down and ponder meanings and associations as we shuttle back and forth through the palindromic structure. How, for example, does our perception of the phrase  ‘trains the eyes’ differ from that of its word-palindromic opposite, ‘eyes the trains’? To what extent are words themselves ‘untrustworthy vehicles’? 

10. Nowhere at Home by Pedro Poitevin (Penteract Press)

Pedro Poitevin’s debut collection in English seamlessly interweaves the personal and the universal, the mathematical and the lyrical, in formal, often highly constrained poems that are also full of grace. At times the constraints even seem to write themselves into the poem, as in the self-enumerating, self-descriptive sonnet “As my Three Children Tidy Up their Rooms”. There’s a sonnet with zero letters, a sonnet found in the genome of a cat, redividers and palindromes among many other delights. Here are the opening lines of “Under the Bedroom Skylight” (look in particular at the end-words in each line):

Scanning the sky this way and that to keep
the light those distant galaxies emit,
we sense our insignificance––how time
dissolves like snow on seawater. We peek
beyond Andromeda and dream a wolf
gazes at us with quasar-eyes and loops
around while night unwinds the cosmic spool.
We lie intent on stillness but still flow.

11. White Noise Machine by Richard Skinner (Salt Publishing)

This effortlessly elegant collection explores sound and our responses to sound – temporal, synaesthetic and associative. We hear the call of a lapwing; the harmony and counterpoint in the blending of lines taken from song lyrics; the echo of vowels and consonants under lipogrammatic constraints; the metronomic repetition in a triolet and the cherry tree that “explodes in white noise every spring”.  These poems coax us into listening attentively – an under-valued and much-needed attribute in today’s shouty world.

12. Tesserae: A mosaic of poems by Zimbabwean women, edited by Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure and Marian Christie (yes, me) (Carnelian Heart Publishing; available from Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes and Noble)

It was a joy to work with Samantha Vazhure and all the contributing poets on this book, which has been selected by Brittle Paper as one of their 100 Notable African Books of 2023. The anthology includes inspirational ekphrastic pieces by Lin Barrie; work by established writers such as Tariro Ndoro, Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Afric McGlinchey and Samantha Vazhure herself; and stunning poems by new and emerging Zimbabwean poets, whose distinctive voices deserve a wide audience. Their poetry explores broad-ranging themes: family and parenthood, xenophobia, queerness, humour, allegory, and socio-political commentary, as in Mercy Dhliwayo’s “Dear Black Man”, with its heartfelt yearning for reasons to write ‘Better poems… Smiling Poems’.

And my Christmas wish for you, dear reader? –– may 2024 be a year in which we all have reasons to write ‘Smiling Poems’.