Best summer books of 2024: Poetry

Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird (Carcanet)

Bird’s eighth collection is playful, irreverent and witty — even in poems that are set in some of life’s darker places. From a grandmother’s alarming dying words to an unlikely reincarnation of Gilbert and Sullivan, occasionally taking the assertions of a “boss” toddler as a jumping-off point, Bird never fails to surprise.

Ruin, Blossom by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)

Sadly Burnside’s final collection before his death last month at the age of 69, Ruin, Blossom embraces transition and the fleeting, fading, but ultimately renewing nature of all things. His characteristically astute, finely observed lines find the redeeming light in a challenged natural world. 

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Open Mouths by Sharan Hunjan (Rough Trade Books)

The title of the Londoner’s debut collection is inspired by a frozen screen during a lockdown video call, and in her poems she takes everyday snapshots and weaves them into vignettes that are by turns riotous and thoughtful. Amid the vivacious humour, awestruck portraits of her child as a tiny, miraculous, godlike creature are sweetly moving.

Still City: Diary of an Invasion by Oksana Maksymchuk (Carcanet)

In her first collection in English, Ukrainian-American Maksymchuk documents life in her home city of Lviv and across Ukraine — from the dread of invasion in late 2021 to the reality of being under attack. Using others’ accounts as well as her own, she immerses us in a world where fear and violence seep in to the point where they are startlingly routine: “how normal it all now feels/how boring”.

Conflicted Copy by Sam Riviere (Faber)

It might be a brave leap for a poet to create a collection using Open AI’s GPT2 — or, arguably, it’s the logical evolution from William Burroughs’ cut-ups and Bowie’s Verbasizer. Either way, here Riviere has worked with the open-source network to produce poems that intrigue, like carnival mirrors, reflecting and distorting our — and perhaps the machine’s — concepts of what poetry should be.

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