American poet Zakia Carpenter-Hall’s stunning debut Into the Same Sound Twice is a place where ‘the ordinary rules of motion’ don’t always apply. In the title poem, the narrator explains ‘As a child I mixed up the words musician/ and magician’; what ensues are words, bodies and environments that thrum with new music. Carpenter-Hall asks us, ‘Could I be the Instrument?’
A tour-de-force sequence, ‘The Earth-Eating Fire’, is a reflection on wildfires all over the world, from California to Australia. The poem considers how human beings impact the outside world and vice versa in a way that’s both hauntingly delicate and powerful. Captured in these poems – both intimate and vast – is the sense of how much we do not know, how much there still is to be achieved – but sometimes the body, rhythm and poetry itself can be a conduit.