Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Smoke
Windows, Liver House, 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY £4.00 for 4 issues, singles 80p.


Smoke 55 continues this magazine's good reputation with a particularly fine collection. Byran Biggs' artwork is striking and expresses moods, mostly of doubt or fear, very well, but I felt they should be considered in their own right, not as an illustration of any of the poems, which speak for themselves. Denise Bennett's Pelican turns around beautifully from the fable of wounded beasts and the scientific knowledge of regurgitation to feed the young to a sense of exuberance and identity, '...but let me tell you / how I fly in a squadron, / dancing on the air stream; / lifting my wings, / lifting my wings'.

   Poems in this selection celebrate the mysterious, not always the dark side of life and are exploratory of feelings, in the particular way that poetry can do so well. David Bateman reflects on the essence of a tree, on the different perceptions of it and what a particular tree can evoke: '...I was thinking about the sunlight / on a certain evening / in my sad childhood / and you were thinking about something else. / All of us were thinking about so many things... Carving it was difficult, / every cut and shaving a denial / of all the other trees, / so solid, so real and undefined..'(from This is The Tree...).  Krishna Candeth writes, quietly and movingly and powerfully, of horrors in from ghosts in the rain: ' They say there are bullets still in the trees, / A man with a leg torn by a mine says / he can feel the ache of the rotting bark...' He continues to reflect,  'They say grief's a demon / with five thousand heads...', underlining this point with the image >Who cheered at the banquet and / butchered the children? / Who threw them in wells and / unleashed the past?' Maighread Medbh's fine poem, The Unbecome, studies the loss of identity and the fear of Bridgie who '...doesn't know that she's alive. / She carries her flesh like the dark load / heaped in baskets on a donkey's back'. This excellent image is followed later in the poem with the reflection 'Evicted, she walks a narrow corridor / between name and its absence, not seeing the others, / believing herself the only one without grasp // of this inaccurate map that is the body...'