Magazine Roundup
MOODSWING 20 £2-30 from 12 Derby Crescent, Moorside, Consett, Co. Durham DH8 8DZ. Unique folding booklet of poems. John Younger says Shall I compare you love to Doris Day? Surely no tongue in cheek with Doris! David R.Morgan finds Jesus in ajar of Marmite — but don’t expect him to be in every one. Try a copy.
THE MOON Vol.7 Issues 7,8,9. $3 each from 530W Berry St. #904, Fort Wayne, [IN46802, USA. Good to see it thriving, and with colour now. T. Kilgore Splake susses out the Dysfunctional Baccalaureate, gets his mojo working on Pink Floyd, and waves The Watchtower in despair. But not as much despair as Robert M. Zoschke who vies with his agent to claim the more miserable existence.
THE HORSES MOUTH No.12 Free from [email protected] Michael Yates says that suicide is only death, while the other poets included are no where near so lively.
CARILLON 24 £3-50 from 19 Godric Avenue, Brinsworth, S.Yorkshire S60 5AN. For some reason, Edith Sitwell in that daft hat came immediately into mind on reading Harriet E.Rose’s fine poem about having tea out of Bakelite cups with a Miss Grier. The self-depreciating, ever so humble, Zekria Ibrahimi (I wish he’d stop prostrating his soul before editors), comes up with a very nice rhyme-scheme for his How Frank Died poem, and John Critchley watches the sun setting over the pitbanks of Doncaster in a magical piece.
WATERWAYS Vol 28, No.s 8 & 9. $4 ea. from www.tenpennvolavers.oru William Corner-Clarke is a great bear with frost on his fur and Donald Lev discusses robots that are morally and ethically superior, in this fine little magazine from the U.S.A.
POETIC LICENCE 29 £3-50 from 70 Aveling Close, Purley, Surrey CR8 4DW. Austin McCarron places a garden path (like gre hair/turned silver) between dandelions armed with sick flowers, and Ian Mullins amuses when he tells why he’s pissed off with sex education.
POETRY CORNWALL 25 £3-95 from I Ia, Penryn Street, Redruth TRIS 25P. D.J.Weston’s butterfly haiku flutters along on a morning jog and a boy gets his member stuck in a bottle, a message that doesn’t wind up on the seashore, but in Outpatients.
ESSENCE 3 is an experimental issue. £3-50 from [email protected]. I get in there with a poem about ten companies chosen at random from the B.T. phonebook to do with sailing. Then there’s Yassen Vasilev looking at the world through the holes in a cheese, and Chris Major’s Self-Harm Sonnet complete with a drawing of a razor-blade.
POETRY SCOTLAND Issues 61,62. Colin Will goes to a do down south and finds that Scotsmen in kilts come from Milton Keynes. Kenneth Steven, s Rannock and Tobermory provide perfect images of the Scottish landscape.
THE COFFEE HOUSE Issue 10, £2-50 c/o Charnwood Arts, Loughborough Library, 31 Granby Street, Loughborough, Leicestershire LEI1 3DU. John Adair’s woman at the self-help group collects travel brochures, and as she’s now afraid to go out, re-enacts past visits in her kitchen. Perhaps the best poem is Adrian Blackledge’s tale of Buster Keaton’s later years restrained in a clinic, while Maureen Gallacher touches by proxy the hand of Trotsky, and Bobby Parker finds his Marilyn in an estate garage. Trying to write a poem as thin as the paper it’s written on, Nora Nadjuran comes close, but Peter De Ville and Dylan Willoughby are spot on with the use of out of date poetic usage — O how archaic can they get? A mixture of the good, the experimental and the not so good, and one of the featured poets is back next issue — shucks!
FROM INDIGO DREAMS PRESS 132, Hinkley Road, Stoney Stanton LE9 4LN the following publications:
REACH magazine issues 130-132, £4 each. Your behaviour, people of Wachet, is not all it could be, so “watch it!” is the message from Ronnie Goodyer. You’ve all heard the Librarian booming out that The Library Will be Closing Soon, Get your books scanned now, well Bernard M.Jackson turns over a few more pages on the subject in a brilliant, well-paced, and perfectly scanned poem. Peter Johnson provides one of his Jack Vettriano-style vignettes, and a what-the-hell villanelle. Ken Campion too.
THE DAWNTREADER Issues 7,8. £4 each. Brendan Hawthorne’s Ghost Train does a special run, while Stevens visits Ynys Enlli.
SARASVATI Issues 4,5. £4 each. Getting a chance to have 4 or more poems published together is an opportunity that should bring out a poet’s best work. I was a bit disappointed with some poets included here, but Tina Negus shone with Afternoon in Autumn, and Robin Gurney’s The White Lady had a nice haunting quality. Peter Johnson’s Still Life and Ruth Rosenthal's For Want of Red were enjoyable. Vanessa Stafford has some fine metaphors but they tend to obliterate the storyline.
2 Anthologies from lndigo Dreams Press:
INDIGO POETS 2008 (poet’s choice) £5.50. The best of last year chosen by the reader / poets, who should know better. I’m in there for one, but it’s the intrusive rhyme of Sidney Morleigh, Norman Brown and Beryl Cross that should have got up readers’ noses as well as mine. Ron Woollands has a strange poem on the wanderings of Dylan Thomas’ childhood beach ball??? Don’t become editors!
and again last night... £7-75 is an anthology of love and erotic poetry. Erotic it aint, but there’s some good stuff here. Bernard Jackson shows again his excellent rhyming abilities, Alan Spencer, J.J.Jarrett, Barbara Robinson, Dawn Bauling, Ruth Rosenthall provide good work and Lyn Woollacot goes back to the basic birds and bees. It’s left to Maria Ilieva to provide the one (almost) erotic poem. Frank Hajcak on page 77 says it all. Get a copy to find out what.
TROUBLE SWAPPED FOR SOMETHING FRESH Edited by Rupert Loydell - a hefty, gloss-covered book of writers’ manifestoes from SALT PUBLISHING. Prose as well as poetry, dealing only with the poetry here. Andrew Taylor says that poetics steals from anywhere and provides the poem to prove it; Janet Butler Holm goes for The Word Is My Leopard - I felt I had spots on my spectacles at times when I read her fragmented pieces; and Mark Goodwin has Sylvia Plath strapped to a chair with black&red typewriter ribbons, being interrogated by one Agent Smith, in my favourite poem in the collection.
GET IT by Onya Wick £4-95 from 71 Easton Road, New Ferry, Wirral CH62 IDP. Onya Wick is a trio of performance poets, Maureen Weldon, Mike Penney and Kemal Houghton. This is in essence a handbook of their stage act. I don’t know Mike, but Kemal has had some good poems in magazines recently — Poetry Scotland springs to mind, and Maureen is well known in Small Press circles and elsewhere. The poems that the three of them have written together, are good, especially Like The Shuffle of a Card, but I was disappointed in Kemel’s individual poems on the page and Mike’s pieces with music don’t come over. Maureen contributes a number of fine poems that I already know and a couple of good new ones.
WAVES 2009 Society of Civil and Public Service Writers annual anthology, £2-50 from 48 Marlborough Rd., Ashford TWI5 3QA. Norman Bissett places his cabbage at the Harvest Thanksgiving, while Eleanor Broaders chooses a dandelion clock, frozen at midnight, as her offering. Sheila Nicholls provides a neat description of a Scotland where A burn skooshes peaty amber, and there’s spiritual emotion from Bill Douglas.
From Wendy Webb Books, 9 Walnut Close, Norwich NR8 6YN, the following: NORFOLK POETS & WRITERS ANTHOLOGY £3-50 As the weather changes from a nice glow to grey, Pamela Hodge watches as her chap is lost to the bikini girl on the beach. Michael Newman says there’s no need to do cartwheels, just be yourself and Alison Chisholm disagrees, she wants poems that bite her not those all about butterflies and buttercups.
SCIENCE + MAGIC and other inferior religions, by Richard Warren, £1 from 68 Wood Green Road, Wednesbury WS10 9QT. In Big Bang Day he says You... / who limit love’s living to experimentation/ I wish you joy... / but doubt your final dispensation. And the kids at school science classes take their weekend dance of pleasure... /shake their gelled heads in ecstasy or terror/ educated by effects they can't explain. Poems on Paganland with a deconstructed brain ranting on a mobile phone, the Postmodern lad whose accent’s mid-Atlantic and hair is New-Romantic, and the phone that trills doom in outpatients. Richard Warren’s mind on a plate.
SONGS FOR LESSER GODS by Lesley Quayle, from erbacce press (see website). Written in effective, jerky Cooper-Clarkeesque, a couple discuss their child grown to a man. A violent house has women with slack tits and bellies / slung beneath dresses, like roosting bats and the man a cheerless drunk. Subjects and styles vary, there’s foxes, broth, exercise, and turtles — but these aren’t pithy descriptions, some even get you holding your breath in serious contemplation of what will come next.
NO GOLGOTHA FOR GOD by Brian Blackwell £3-99 from 65 Austhorpe Road, Leeds LS15 SEQ. Blackwell claims that this is the only lengthy book of poems to be completely on the subject of atheism. He doesn’t put man at the top of the evolutionary tree, but does have faith in mankind, though at the same time thinks many are prone to being taken in by mumbo-jumbo. There should be a freedom to manage your own perceptions instead of brain-washing teaching from an early age. The bible gives up its stories in many variations and it seems that atheists repeat themselves a little too in order to get their message across. Choose your good book now.
VERSES FROM THE CREMATORIUM by Henry Blake, £3 from Flat 49, Tillet’s Lane, Warnham, West Sussex. No self-esteem Blake gives himself no title in a poem where he is in the gutter with two-legged rats laughing at him. He moved to London for some erotic fin, but southern people urinated in his dreams. He promises to cut up his wife and her lover with a chainsaw and take them to work, just like a packed lunch. His nurse rants on that I feed you/Wash you, listen to your cacophony... / Take your stool samples to the laboratory... but sometimes he forgets these are poems and
they become plain prose rants. I quite like them.
LISTENING FOR LIGHT by Ken Head, £6-50 Poetry Monthly Press, 39 Cavendish Rd., Long Eaton NGI 0 4HY. Ken starts out on a dark journey past parked cars, expensive jewellers, cheap hotel, charity collectors in a sequence to the end of the road. Another country now and exploration, narrow donkey tracks, black-clad priests, Russian icons, then on to doom — the world left empty of people but not the sounds of the trees and streams, the collapse of government, the demise of the honey-bee, ghosts watching old movies. It is a time when mistrust and fear / find everyone guilty. The end it seems contains plenty of nothing. Let it all be a warning to you.
MAKE SOME NOISE by Andrew Taylor £2-50 from Original Plus, 17 High Street, Maryport CAl 5 6BQ. These are descriptive poems of Woking that are given without comment in the main. Even when he walks the town in H.G.Wells’ shoes nothing gets very exciting. A series of lists of what he sees.
THIS 7 YEAR OLD WALKS INTO A BAR by Gill O’Halloran £6 from Indigo Dreams Publishing (see Reach etc.) Sometimes walks between the surreal and the silly and sometimes falls off, becomes a 7 year old’s thoughts after he’s had a few. There’s a girl who wants the knowledge a goldfish has. How to hold its peachy slip / or scrape the green worry of algae's / slick... of slime is brilliant, as is heat stretches across Cameroon / like a tripwire but there are some childish episodes — quad bikes leaping off motorways and flesh sinking into the mire, neck-slitting etc. I like the teenage girl scholars who came to learn French and now know everything. Worth it for the purple bits, but would have benefited by the removal of a couple of items.
ALRIGHT SQUIRE by Tanner, Last Chance Before Bathtime publ. £2 from Paul Tanner at C709, 3 Kenyon Steps, One Park West, Liverpool Ll3BH. Not all his best, but what do you expect if a bloke’s trying to write while The girl upstairs is hanging / out the window screaming/ because her fellahs had a few? This is all about there being nothing about, about sucking recession’s cock, of working to earn an obsolete currency / in a dead empire.. it’s death with no afterlife and the blackeye of defiance.
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magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The