Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems 1961-2023 by Margaret Atwood (Vintage/Knopf)The Canadian novelist began her writing career as a poet and returned to the form in recent years with Dearly, one of the collections reproduced in this six-decade-spanning tome. By turns deeply introspective and outward looking, Atwood’s poetry is as clear-eyed, uncompromising and masterly as her prose.Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird (Carcanet) The English poet wears her wide-ranging formal skill lightly in her eighth collection: a clever, funny and moving reflection on life’s dramatic turns and their aftermath. Several of the poems here take “what if?” as their starting point, tackling topics from addiction to daily domesticity with results that are highly entertaining and relatable.Sidetracks by Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang (Carcanet/New Directions)Dao’s first book-length poem transports us through the years, countries and memories that followed his 1989 expulsion from China (his poems were recited by students in Tiananmen Square). The restlessness of these 34 cantos, which dart between personal experience and historical moment, creates a vital expression of the exile’s condition. Presented in parallel text with the original Mandarin.Fierce Elegy by Peter Gizzi (Penguin Poetry/Wesleyan University Press)Shortlisted for this year’s TS Eliot Prize (and first published in the US last August), Fierce Elegy captures the state of grief while eschewing any hint of the maudlin. In spare, lyrical poems, Gizzi’s powers of concision and grounded “old language” meet his striving for the unknown — with titles such as “Dissociadelic” nodding to the strain of finding oneself “a desperate player / in the invisible world”.Bluff by Danez Smith (Chatto & Windus/Graywolf Press)The Minneapolis-based poet, who won the Forward Prize for 2018’s Don’t Call Us Dead, reckons with the grief and protest that ripped through their hometown and across the US after the murder of George Floyd. Ever inventive and tender, here Smith’s piercing honesty is sharper than ever: “there I was, writing anthems in a nation whose victory was my blood.”Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café
