# The best recent poetry – review roundup

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup-2/
- Published: 2026-07-31T11:00:11+00:00
- Updated: 2026-07-31T11:35:11+00:00
- Original publisher: The Guardian (publisher lean: Left)
- Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/31/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup
- Topics: Americas, Art, Culture, Entertainment, Music, World

## Key points

- Four collections test poetry’s formal and thematic boundaries.
- Subjects include cities, migration, step-parenting and prison.
- Review highlights bold language and contemporary resonance.

## Summary

A review roundup assesses four recent poetry collections, each using distinctive forms to explore everyday life, displacement, family roles or institutional confinement.

- Matthew Welton’s *Small Birds Singing* uses flexible unrhymed couplets to find meaning in ordinary urban scenes and overlooked objects.
- Jana Prikryl’s *The Channel* reworks *King Lear* and personal Czech displacement to examine migration, exile and fractured language.
- Helen Mort’s *Stepmother* challenges hostile fairy-tale stereotypes, connecting myth to the complex realities of modern blended families.
- Martina Evans’s *Drunken Driving* follows a young mother working at Pentonville prison, combining sonnets with prison, driving and literary texts.

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Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.