The best recent poetry – review roundup

The Universe is an Animal by Jessica Mookherjee; Sleep Gate by Sylvia Legris; The Other Love by Henri Cole; Stay Winter by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe

99) In this confident and capacious collection, scientific language commingles with familial histories of displacement and war. Echoes of violence, from the partition of East Pakistan and India, now modern-day Bangladesh, to an arrival in Wales, haunt many of the poems. In Waterlily, Mookherjee inverts Monet’s signature image into something far more sinister. An aunt “hides under Bhatiyari Lake, sari billows / until the men leave” to escape communal riots. Longer poems, such as this one, encode repetition and refrain into a genetic pattern of sound and meaning: “the dress she sews me is washed / with river mud from Bangladesh.