Bellringer

Nkechi Aduba's first collection takes its title from her grandfather, who rang the tenor bell at a Suffolk parish church for thirty-one years and who could not, at the end, remember the name of the village. Bellringer is a book about what carries: sound over fields, method over memory, one generation's discipline arriving in the next as a habit nobody can explain.

The poems move between Ipswich and Enugu, between a bell tower and a compound wall, and they are structured — audibly — on change ringing. Sequences repeat with one pair swapped. Lines return in a different order and mean something else. It is a formal conceit that could have been merely clever, and is instead the engine of the book's grief.

Aduba has a marvellous ear for the flat comedy of English institutional life: the parish notice, the rota, the tea urn, the man who has views about the ropes. She sets it against a second register altogether — praise poetry, market noise, a language she half-holds — and lets the two ring against each other without resolving them.

Twelve of these poems appeared in magazines; the long central sequence, 'Ropes', is published here for the first time. It is one of the best things we have read in a decade of reading manuscripts.