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

Allan Burgis. TALKING TO MYSELF, Green Horse Publications, 18pp/10p (‘Avalon’, London Road, Stockbridge, Hants, SO20 6EJ); TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN, Oasis Books, 21pp/35p; FOURTEEN POEMS, Community of Friends Special Supplement (U.S.A.), 20pp/np; DEGREES OF EXILE Rivelin Press, 20pp/20p (157, Sharrow Vale Road, Sheffield, S11 8ZA).

     ‘Poetry has become for me the most natural way of reacting to my immediate situation’ Allan Burgis writes in the introduction to FOURTEEN POEMS, In which he deals with how he came to write poetry and what his aims and methods are. It is for him a thinking aloud, a diary of day to day impressions. He is, moreover, a prolific writer and, as with many such, a trifle uncritical. Though there is a minor amount of reduplication of the material in his four booklets, and it is culled from his output over seven years, so much published In a period of less than a year tends to make one slightly suspicious.

     On the whole, however, there is little to take exception to in at least three of the collections, even if the contents are not wildly exciting either. Their very unpretentiousness Is perhaps their virtue; they are just what he claims them to be, lightly personal poems spiced with elfin humour, dealing for the most part with a variety of relationships, sprinkled with several memorable fancies. The title TALKING TO MYSELF Is, then, a just description of what is to be found in the poems it contains: a bit about himself, a bit about his current woman, something on the end of a marriage, and portraits of odd people he has met, including the admirably humorous ‘Heaven’s Bells’ which begins as a description of an old woman dying and ends on a wry joke In the relief of her recovery. Then there are evocations of places he has been to, of which my favorite is his fantasy of London reverting to the wild upon seeing the disused Highgate Station; also two very pretentious pieces on the coming of winter and of spring, the longest and (I imagine) the earliest written in the collection.

     One is able to plot the development of Burgis’ writing since date and place of composition accompany the poems in both FOURTEEN POEMS and DEGREES OF EXILE. This is a narcissistic device and an irrelevance. No-one is going to feel a thrill of excitement as he approaches Scunthorpe at the thought that Burgis was churning his stuff out in the vicinity one summer day five years ago. Still, we learn from it that he has only achieved his present degree of control after much effort In the last two or three years. Most of his writing before that is a miserably weak performance of unbearable pretentiousness. There is still the tendency to backslide when he quits his slightly detached, ironic stance for something more portentous, although ‘Half way across a chasm there is no turning back’ In TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN is a very fine performance In territory normally so dangerous for him.

     Of the other collections, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN and FOURTEEN POEMS are much the same enjoyable combinations of short and reasonably pithy summings up of current experience, except that the latter seems to contain a greater proportion of early poems with their often puny efforts at humour, straining after effect and immature shooting off at the mouth.

     The worst excesses of this, however, a succession of long, dull maunderings, are reserved for DEGREES OF EXILE, which is a mistake from almost every point of view, down to the choice of pink for paper and cover (the booklet in duplicated In quarto size) and the undistinguished design by Angela Cleverley, his present assistant editor on EUREKA. One feels that he has been scraping the barrel to get this together and would have done better to have saved the handful of good poems (two of which are in other collections anyway) until he had produced others worthy of them. The trouble, of course, is that this Is meant to be a ‘serious’ collection the title is the give-away - rather than another random sampler. I hope he does not repeat the error. As it is, anyone unacquainted with the direction his work is now taking will be so sick of the unformed posturings of his apprentice years In this collection that those poems which are readable will hardly be counted redeeming features or an earnest of the passable poet Allan Burgis is undoubtedly becoming.