Ben Wilkinson

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99 The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come. Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens |

The opening poem in John Whale’s debut collection concerns a species of chameleon-like octopus: a flexible and capable creature, we are told, “at the invertebrate zenith”. With “three pumping hearts” and “no rigid form”, its appeal to Whale is clear enough: his poetic voice revels in its own adaptability, switching between scientific jargon, emotional verve, and subtler, insinuating tones. This allows for a smorgasbord of subjects, and lends Waterloo Teeth an intellectual range that is beyond most slim volumes: moving from the eerie yet touching quatrains of “Mary Toft”, who amusingly ruined the reputations of several eminent eighteenth-century physicians by fooling them into thinking she had given birth to rabbits, to the tumbling rhythms and blunt close of “Mimicries”, which catalogues birds imitating modern technological sounds. Beneath the book’s surface variety, however, a handful of recurrent themes emerge. Whale is a professor of Romantic literature, so it is not surprising t