IN glass knot sun (Ignition Press, £7) British Latinx poet and editor Patrick Romero McCafferty unveils a personal narrative that transports readers from Mexico to Scotland and back. The book explores the materiality of the land, soil and human labour with striking beauty and profound insight.

The pamphlet, featuring 18 powerful poems, begins with Espiritu Santo With Snorkeller ’17, a visual poem that depicts a landscape in Mexico with mountains, the sun, a tranquil sea, and undercurrents represented by moving symbols “>==o> >==o>”. There is something mysterious and suggestive about this poem, which precedes A Doorway Between Explosions, written by the author about the San Juanico Disaster in Mexico City in 1984. 

Here, Romero McCafferty underscores the human suffering resulting from a tragedy that claimed more than 500 lives and left around 7,000 people severely burned: 

“the first having shaken home the city’s roots/ we went to get you from your house under the hill.// you stood waiting beneath the cracked lintel, the fallout/ dawn bracing for a second, a shawl across your shoulders,// & in the hand you held at your apron, an avocado,/ as if the deaths we did not yet know had taken place// stopped there, at that emboldening armoured fruit,/ the stone at the centre of all the pain still unaccounted for.”

Each poem in this exquisite pamphlet showcases the poet at his finest, crafting a refined poetic narrative that engages with the materiality of the world and all its elements to endure. For instance, in his poem Building Your Hut In The Woods: “between living & working when will you ever rest?/ should angles disappear & the structure slopingly breathe/ & I hold it in the way, sometimes, the dirt a house”.

In Dreams of Diminished Responsibility (Odilo Press, £15) Miguel Cullen explores the concept of a bewildering dream or a sequence of such dreams to depict a world and human interactions that become increasingly nonsensical as the book progresses.

Each of the poems/dreams in this post-punk collection takes the reader on a fascinating journey of nonsensical experiences, where London appears like a kaleidoscopic city filled with extraordinary characters and surreal situations.

In Bedsit Land, we move from “Paddington, Bayswater, Lancaster Gate, Porchester Place, Queensway hotels/ in wedding-cake houses/ surrounded by piked railings with flags, like tattered drapery over the fourposter-portico” to a poetic meditation on love, wedding memories and home: “how love in old age, is stronger as it is felt through grief/ my ring since lost, said ‘HOME’, inscribed in/ italics”.

These expansive poems encompass much irony, dark humour, pleasure, and a sense of displacement and fragmentation, both in relation to the poet’s inner world and to how we might perceive the modern world around us.

I’m fascinated by Cullen’s ability to transport me into strangely constructed places where I don’t quite know what will happen next or who I will bump into. His poetic dreams or hallucinations amazed me but also baffled me. I urge you to read his otherworldy visions and long, curious lines, like those in Deeply-Accultured Dream: “walking across the repetitive dream about/ cows that looked like rhinoceros or hippos/ but had a fondness for me/ so wouldn’t charge”.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Conjurer (Arc Publications, £10.99) by Mexican poet Pedro Serrano. Intelligently translated by poet and translator Anna Crowe, who also wrote an illuminating introduction, this bilingual book draws on both unpublished and published works from Serrano’s collections Desplazamientos, Nueces, and Lo que falta. 

The collection includes poems that feature London, a city where Serrano lived and which he knew well. This is evident in the opening poem, one of my favourites from the book, Fairytale Morning In Islington, where “Dawn arrives with splendour,/ everything entrusted to dew-laden lawns, to the barking of dogs like signals”, or in Queen’s Park where “One garden is another garden full of flowers, empty,/ exhausted and betrayed in its never-to-be-repeatedness”.

I enjoyed the seemingly deceptive simplicity in Serrano’s verses and the way he weaves through memory and his perception of the natural world, paying special attention to the music of poetry, its intrinsic texture and sounds of words, and the beauty of everyday life. 

An extraordinary collection.