Ange Mlinko, Foxglovewise (Faber, 2025); John Burnside, The Empire of Forgetting (Cape, 2025)

Ange Mlinko’s Foxglovewise finds its inspiration and derives its title from Louise Gluck’s poem ‘Matins’. Its epigraph, taken from that poem, reads: ’are you like the hawthorn tree, always the same thing in the same place,  or are you the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up  a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,  and the next year, purple in the rose garden’. Fulfilling the promise of its coined word title, Foxglovewise is not inconsistent, but pleasingly various and surprising. It takes in multiple geographies and handles them with great formal dexterity. A good example is ‘The Iliad in a Scottish Cemetery’ in which the speaker declares ‘I am in two countries at once, by turn  testing on my tongue the umami of these sounds,  iron-laced water like blood-anointed spear tips  and the tangy granite in the skirling burn.’ Here, the clever doubleness of the poem derives from the speaker visiting Scotland while listening to the ancient epic through her headphones. ‘Radishes’ offers another opportunity for Mlinko to test (or taste) out family history – as well as the sad fact of aging – on her palette:

[…]                          Best is raw
it’s ‘war’ backward, like a spell
grown in the cold ground, color
of rose and snow – so good to gnaw
a vegetable so filial and feral
late in the year, when the knife is duller.

This creatively playful attention to the senses is a recurrent feature of Mlinko’s work. As the epigraph suggests, the ...