A Survivor’s Song

For an undergraduate feeling his way into the UK poetry scene, the contrasting reactions to Sarah Howe’s first collection in 2015 had the effect of flares marking safe passage through a murky bog. Who was likely to welcome and champion voices like hers – erudite, sensitive, and unapologetically inflected by an upbringing in Hong Kong – and who, on the other hand, was to be avoided at a reading. When Howe’s name was called the following year at the T.S. Eliot Prize ceremony, Loop of Jade became a signal in its own right, for me and other young writers with odd accents, of the sort of poetics our voices could inhabit to be heard in the plush halls of the V&A.

All this bears remembering with the release of Howe’s follow-up collection, which strikes the reader as more adventurous and certainly angrier, though no less astute than her accomplished debut. In the intervening decade it is not only her poetics that has changed, but the contours of the publishing landscape and of society at large, especially in terms of our appetite for difference. There have been changes, too, on the personal front. Howe writes unflinchingly about the death of her father (a central figure in Loop of Jade), and tenderly about everyday milestones in her young children’s lives. With a new keenness to the possibilities of form, Foretokens is an apposite reply to the umbrage and upheavals Howe has weathered, in the same clear voice that first emerged ten years ago.

Running through the ...