New Cemetery

ONE OF THE BEST POETRY BOOKS OF THE YEAR FROM THE GUARDIAN AND THE OBSERVER • From the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, a poem sequence that considers our use of the land that surrounds him, and recounts the personal tales of beauty and loss that play out on it

A few years ago, in the poet’s home county of West Yorkshire, the Local Authority began converting a series of cow fields near his home into a new cemetery. As the graveyard takes shape, its presence on the brow of the hill casts a lengthening shadow over the imagination and enlivens the poet’s landscape, both inner and outer. These poems, in regular, cascading tercets, sparked into being as he daily walked the site, with moorlands rising beyond it and the wind turbines of Brontë country to the north. Eventually the muddy construction scene gives way to fresh headstones and mown lawns, and, during the COVID-19 lockdown, the spectacle of gravediggers in hazmat suits. The poet retreats to write in his garden shed, charting his losses, conversing fruitfully with the dead, and engaging the world in the perilous present.

The sharply observed lyrics in New Cemetery—each fancifully named for a species of moth, a creature whose numbers the poet sees dwindling across a lifetime of night walks—remind us to turn a cool eye on the doings of man, and yet to embrace all we love while we still can, as “Time, what else,” stands “propped in a corner / like a cricket bat.”