Best summer books of 2023: Poetry

The Home Child by Liz Berry (Chatto & Windus)

Berry’s novel in verse is based on an aunt she never met, who was one of thousands of orphaned or impoverished “home children” sent from Britain to Canada by the authorities that should have protected them. It’s vivid, compassionate and, a century after her forced migration, makes little Eliza Showell’s voice heard at last.

Content Warning: Everything by Akwaeke Emezi (Bloomsbury/Copper Canyon Press)

In Emezi’s powerful debut poetry collection, the prolific writer blasts wide open the boundaries of memoir and fantasy. A parallel biblical family becomes a place of safety and belonging; exchanges of power are scrutinised through the lens of trauma; and Emezi’s navigation of survival and renewal is by turns playful and devastating.

To 2040 by Jorie Graham (Carcanet/Copper Canyon Press)

Graham’s 15th collection takes on the inevitability of extinction — of the individual narrator, of species and of the planet itself. If that sounds grim, it’s anything but: this is an urgent, vivacious book based in stark reality but written with craft and beauty.

Brother Poem by Will Harris (Granta)

The Forward Prize winner returns with a series of poems addressing a fictional brother, who at times presents as a reflection, a loss, or a memory that has been crafted as carefully and lovingly as a poem. Harris’s absorbing verse is rich with subtly shifting stories, slippery connections and a wonder of the spaces created by language.

Blood Feather by Patrick McGuinness (Jonathan Cape)

McGuinness is a novelist and award-winning author of non-fiction as well as a poet, and the writing in Blood Feather, his third collection, is an eloquent fusion of the delicate and the direct. In a sequence of poems about his late mother, his explorations of her life and her sense of self are especially moving.

Was It for This by Hannah Sullivan (Faber)

In the direct style that characterised 2018’s award-winning Three Poems, Sullivan brings weight and meaning even to the most everyday minutiae. In the opening poem, her own experience of early motherhood blends with the collective trauma of the Grenfell disaster a few streets from her home; elsewhere, she documents the places and people of her memories with striking realism.

Summer Books 2023

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Tuesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Wednesday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Thursday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Friday: Critics’ picks
Saturday: History by Tony Barber

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café