Poets possess keys to aspects of the world that are often hidden from our collective view. It is why I turn to them as often as I do whenever I find myself treading water, trying to make sense of things that make me question everything I think I have known. Like our global pandemic, for instance. Nothing prepared us for the weeks of forced isolation, the overwhelming insecurities that bubbled up from within, or the creeping doubt that nothing we really did for a living was of any actual significance. And so, I turned to poetry.

I began with Ilya Kaminsky, whose work I have spent many hours over, grateful for their existence and troubled by how they came into being. Kaminsky's latest collection, Deaf Republic — and only his second in 15 years — seemed to come from a place of startling familiarity, despite the poems being set in a fictional city called Vasenka. They seemed recognisable because of what they described: citizens who lived happily during a war. 'And when they bombed other people's houses,' he writes, 'we protested / but not enough, we opposed them but not / enough.' It moved and angered me, as he spoke of people living 'in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money…' because so much of it resonated with what we have been living through.