Many a poet baulks at the thought of a second collection. Not Rachel Long. Sparrow on the Rooftop (Chatto & Windus, £12.99) announces itself in boisterous, warm and open-hearted poems, prefaced appropriately by a Louise Erdrich epigraph: “Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.” In this book, Long moves between enormous emotional issues with flourish. The piercing opening poem, That Year, where Long brutally beseeches “Your liver, / your poor liver, crying out / for mercy, an inflated claw / on the crack-tile bathroom floor / of your body” is closely followed by Ore, which brilliantly, nonchalantly and conversationally recounts sex: “When he held your face, or touched / any part of your body, it became / a conductive wire.” Long’s poetry manages to capture something very enviable, the rhapsodic and tumbling nature of conversation: from talking very intensely about a book to struggling to eat to falling in love with someone over the phone. Long writes particularly excellent poems about early love. Consider Interesting – “You laughing at the luck in your lap / on loudspeaker, his voice – his.” – complicated admirably with the speaker’s sole drink at the poem’s end. “And so you drank more / once he was gone, to entertain // yourself.” While the compact-lined poem works well, the crowning achievement in Long’s arsenal is the long-lined poems. Tah-dah, didi-didum is a praise song to oneself, and the pleasure of an animal’s company: “You thought getting a puppy would make it better; that sertraline would make it better […] that living room dancing might make it better; and by increments, it does.” I was struck by the overarching impression of love the poems leave. Rachel Long is a poet who brings a reader along into an emotion not as interloper but as confidant. Billy Ramsell’s Render (Banshee, €12) presents itself as a fictive Selected Poems of an imagined Catalan poet, Alberto Canas. The awe-inspiring imaginative panache and chutzpah of this book are overwhelming. Through poems that are spirited and funny, Ramsell imagines the breadth of a poetic life. There are the expected lovesick and backyard epiphany poems in Canas’s first book, such as Two Boys, where Canas observes two men holding hands, then the poet ruminates “On what more distant somewheres / will their tidings, their indigo gospel, / their weightlessness / have settled by morning?” Elsewhere, Ramsell humorously lambasts the young love poem in Dusk and Tomatoes, perforated by adjectives such as “lasciviously” or the repetition of “Come” three times in a single quatrain. While sometimes laugh-out-loud enjoyable, I wondered whether these poems’ sole effect was parody. Render puts me in mind of AS Byatt’s Possession; the unique challenge faced by Render is that, while Possession can scaffold its found material in fictional narrative, Canas’s poems lack this fictive framework, which dulls the emotional tugs of reading Canas’s life’s work, but perhaps that is to miss the point entirely. Render is an imaginative invitation rather than an emotive one. Canas’s chronology is included as an appendix that in itself is enjoyable: “1993: Alberto has a six-month residency in Hungary: no discernible impact on his poetics or general outlook.” [ Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich: Intriguing, vital and often funnyOpens in new window ]Another impressive aspect of Render is Ramsell’s ability to create a believable form for a poet not mired in Irish literary tradition, such as The Top 10 Luminous Mushrooms of Cerdanya Forest: “Black shamrock is much sought-after by a younger, more aggressive demographic with their mohawks, rags and nipple-rings”. Were my poetry-critic alter-ego Michael McCann to review Canas, what might he say? “Alberto Canas is a poet I am ashamed to only read now, and one who will remain with me for a very long time.”How we respond emotionally (rather than intellectually) to history’s erasures is a foundational concern of Máighréad Medbh’s Dwelling (Macha, £15.99), a hybrid text – Medbh terms it “autopoetic essay” – that at its core is an investigation of a family photograph of Medbh’s great-grandmother. Macha Press continue to demonstrate remarkable flourish in book design; throughout Dwelling there are text symbols, a wide array of concrete poetry, census documents and a family photograph with the poet’s great-grandmother’s face erased. The Mark lays out Dwelling’s conceit: “In the photograph her face has been erased. Correction: in the digital scan of the / photograph. No-one knows where the original is.” As I read I reflected on terms applied to books such as “hybrid” or “experimental”; does it refer to more research-informed writing? Cross-genre work? Fragmentary and elliptical language? All feature in Dwelling, and Medbh is a seasoned experimentalist. There is a heady self-consciousness threaded throughout that is, at points, generative, other times less so – consider Medbh’s address of Walt Whitman in The Body Articulate – “I sat I listened I took everything down.” – and at other times the poetic voice is overly cerebral and gets in the way of compelling subject matter. [ Imagine a world where saints roam free, among us, on the bus or in TK MaxxOpens in new window ]Dwelling really sings in moments of unexpected lyrical insight – “But I’m not mapping history. I’m marking moments” – but it rarely rests in one form, orbiting lyric, concrete and verse play-like poems, moving across languages, archival material and transliterations, all to find as many perspectives on absence as possible. In Wild Irish Air: As He Saw It, this playful footnote – “Suppose the young woman he meets to be Kate’s mother” – epitomises Medbh’s deft thinking about the ways in which things are remembered. Dwelling provides a dizzying kaleidoscope of approaches to a subject and is anchored in the spaces between information – in absence itself. Moyra Donaldson, whose latest collection is The Thirteenth Moon Moyra Donaldson’s The Thirteenth Moon (Doire, €16) avoids any assumptions a person could make about an 11th collection; in agile, philosophical and often funny poems, Donaldson takes in climate change and war alongside ageing, the young and grief. The Task opens the book with brio and an impressive brevity:“To still the constant, allow the absent to be and curl my fingers round the day to take it.”The Thirteenth Moon has many moments like this; a poet overwhelmed by the deluge of the present, and often she strikes gold. Donaldson’s strength as a poet is laying the macro alongside the micro. In Funeral Pyres, 2021, she renders the mourning rite in visceral, often uncomfortable terms – “The Ganges bloats with flesh. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar they net the bodies” – then neatly blends it with the climate catastrophe. “If the world burns, we burn with it.” Then, on the facing page, a brief and beautiful lyric, Growing Things, is an account of the comfort a person draws between tending plants: “How tenderly / we’ve treated them; / our hearts’ hurt // weighed against / their steady growth”. By placing tonally non sequitur poems side by side, Donaldson invites the question: how can we live ordinarily, growing flowers from seed, feeding our children, while such world-shifting violence takes place? This book’s strength is sitting in that discomfort, and it does so in a way that lingers in the imagination.There are fine poems elsewhere, namely the concluding Crone sequence, at once devastating and hilarious. “Crone Has // a want on her”; “Crone Knows // if a thing happens twice / it will happen again”; “Crone Has Had // a really good time”. Donaldson is a poet who continues to reinvent and re-energise her work at every turn.Mícheál McCann’s second collection, Lives of the Saints, was published in May by Gallery Press.