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

This is the latest in our series reviewing the current Poetry Book Society choices, with the aim of giving readers an independent opinion of the books and encouraging them to make use of the Society. Publishers in the UK and Ireland send new poetry books to the PBS selectors, a panel of well-known poets who four times a year recommend a variety of choices – new collections, anthologies, a translation, a pamphlet. Their PBS choice of the quarter is provided for members free and other books at a 25% discount.

The Magma reviews cover a selection from these. The opinions expressed are those of the reviewer. All PBS-selected books are available to Magma readers post free (UK only) directly from the PBS. Email: [email protected] to order with a debit / credit card, and for details of overseas p&p rates. The Poetry Book Society is at Fourth Floor, 2 Tavistock Place, London WC1H 9RA. www.poetrybooks.co.uk

In The State of the Prisons (Carcanet), Sinéad Morrissey writes particularly well about people other than herself, often as narratives. Juist is a tight and dramatic poem, narrated by a girl who takes summer work as a waitress in a German resort in the North Sea. This is after the fall of the GDR and she is presumably from further East, speaking no German. She lies her way into the job, hates it, learns as best she can as she goes along, makes a go of it, and in the end is sad to have to leave. She is an individual, it is her personal story, yet at the same time it is the story of the deprived East experiencing something in the West yet not belonging to it. As always, what counts is the detail – swift condensed narrative as in “He asked me to dance. By the time they gave me a door key my wages were missing. / He spent his last night alone in the dunes before vanishing”; moments of escape rendered vividly but straightforwardly, in character, as at the harbour where she would “sit glued / as full moons bounced up over the water, glad to be lonely, and greedy / for the island skies unbroken by buildings and the island stars no street lamps / diminished or dimmed”; her suffering as in “Once, in the middle of a double dinner shift, I started to cry, the first time / the Captain had seen me. He gave me a strawberry schnapps and patted my head. / Grown men have cried here, we thought you’d cry sooner.”

Sinéad Morrissey can be uneven, perplexingly so when she can write so well. She writes most happily when she has a clear subject and line of attack on it. Immediately after Juist comes China, for me a shift to the other extreme of her work, clotted and fuzzy. However, there are numerous other poems of the same standard as Juist, among them Clocks about an old couple, Aunt Sarah’s Cupboards and Drawers, Stepfather about a bushman stepfather in New Zealand guiding three of his family through the wild country where he is at home and they are not, and The Wound Man where she wonders how Lorca would experience our world if he had lived, and turns to the ancient image of the Wound Man – “He’s been badly hit. There are weapons through every part of him. / A knife in the cheek; an arrow in the thigh…” to conclude “And yet he rears. Sturdy and impossible. Strong. / Loose in the world. And out of proportion.”

Among a number of more personal lyrics – where again the most straightforward are the best – I particularly liked Polar, natural and touching. She imagines making gifts to a lover who is heading for the far North: “I want to hap you up / So that you stagger off, surrounded / by my warmth, on your journey / North. I want to wrap / Your delectable backside / (Which I chew on so immoderately / When I’m out of my right mind) / In all the wool of Scotland.”

The collection ends with a long poem narrated by the eighteenth century prison reformer John Howard. This too has Morrissey’s dramatic strength – we believe in him, as when he meets the Pope who starts by being charming in the way the more tactful among the powerful are to the insignificant, but quickly changes tune when Howard loses no time in tackling him about the Inquisition. The poem has the power of brute fact – “The prisoners entered, pulling on long chains./ A muscle pulled in my thumb. The judge was eminent, / Bored, ecclesiastical, inured to the stench of sweat and excrement / That flowered where they stood.” The long lines of her verse allow her narrator to tell his tale in a natural way, without undue formality.

Sinéad Morrissey is a fine poet with a refreshing ability to speak for others as well as herself. Her collection is limited only by an insecure critical sense of what works best for her and what does not.

Alice Oswald in Woods etc (Faber) continues her scrupulous, attentive notation of nature and her responses to it, as in the first stanza of her title poem: “footfall, which is a means so steady / and in small sections wanders through the mind / unnoticed, because it beats constantly, / sweeping together the loose tacks of sound.” She has some captivating images, as when a seed speaks “Increasingly unfocussed, spinning / through the disintegrating kingdom of a garden / and going nowhere / and feeling myself at all angles, / I was huge, / like you might sow a seed guitar / A cryptic shape of spheres and wires.”

Rather than dwelling on these accepted successes, I would like to explore why it is that her touch is less certain when she wants to achieve an added emotional loading, sometimes a near-mystical intensity. Another Westminster Bridge starts “Go and glimpse the lovely inattentive water / discarding the gaze of many a bored street walker / where the weather trespasses into striplit offices / through tiny windows into tiny thoughts and authorities.” This seems a diminished view of the inhabitants and activities of the city by contrast with the river, and to be convinced by the contrast we need to respond to the river with more force than “lovely inattentive water” gives us reason to do. To invite comparison with Wordsworth is to remind us how strongly we do experience the majesty of his city morning, and reminds us too of his generosity of spirit – “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by” does not imply that such dullness is more or less what is to be expected.

Even in her stronger poems a gap can open up between what she wants to express and her means of expressing it. I wonder if this is due to relying too much on description, and on casting this in the direct, everyday language which is au courant at the moment, sometimes reminiscent of Edward Thomas. Field starts with “Easternight, the mind’s midwinter” – presumably a reference to the Christian Easter. She goes on to describe midnight in a landscape: “I could feel the earth’s / soaking darkness squeeze and fill its darkness / everything spinning into the spasm of midnight / and for a moment, this high field unhorizoned / hung upon nothing, barking for its owner.” This describes midnight, but do we experience it with sufficient force as the mind’s midnight or its midwinter? If one thinks of writers who have managed to describe a natural scene in a way that leaves it instinct with emotional power and suggestiveness, their linguistic means stretch beyond these – Wordsworth’s own in the opening books of the Prelude, for example, or Wallace Stevens in Sea Surface Full of Clouds where the difference is between the description of a scene and the creation of a linguistic equivalent for it. The summer which “made one think of rosy chocolate / And pink umbrellas” is evoked rather than directly described. Alice Oswald is an English landscape painter, sensitively and accurately depicting what she sees and occasionally rising to the intensity of a Samuel Palmer. Stevens is a Matisse, who does not depict what he sees but the painterly equivalent of his experience in seeing it.

Alice Oswald is a sensitive and gifted poet who has mastered writing of one sort of poem and seeks to master another. The question I find myself asking is whether the language which suits the first is fully adequate to the second.

To open Jackie Kay’s Life Mask (Bloodaxe) is to feel in immediate personal contact with the poet – rather unexpectedly given the title. There is nothing stagey about these poems, nothing of ‘Here am I being a poet.’ There she is, bang up in front of you, looking you in the eyes.

The collection is dominated by two sequences of poems. The first is about the break-up of a love relationship and has great spontaneity, directness and immediacy. The poems vary in quality as poems and for that matter within poems – some of them fade towards the close – but this is the price of their qualities; they have the kick of life and they contrast with a good deal of contemporary verse which is emotionally strangled by its own craftsmanship.

The first of them, Late Love, starts “How they strut about, people in love, / how tall they grow, pleased with themselves, / their hair, glossy, their skin shining. / They don’t remember who they have been” and concludes with those who are not in love remembering “The past with its rush of velvet, its secret hush // already miles away, dimming now, in the late day.” Her poems speak of the range of moments which make up life and loving – from the epiphany of Glen Strathfarrar when she asks herself “Where you loved me once and had me drink fresh spring water / From your delicate cupped hands, if I can bear / The stock-still beauty after all these years” to the everyday continuities of Mugs where she and the person who is no longer her lover sometimes ask each other if they would like a cup of tea: “For some reason, perhaps living in England a long while, / it consoled me: at least we still boil the kettle / and shout ‘your tea’s ready!’ At least we still – small mercy. / Then we shut the door, retreat into our own private hell.”

The second sequence is about her African father, plus one appealing poem about her Scottish mother. A White African Dress mythologizes a meeting with her father in Africa, a more considered, complex and finished poem than the directly expressive ones in the first sequence. She remembers a heron she saw on her way to meet him. He himself was wearing a white African dress. He ranted and prayed at her feet. And these disparate experiences are brought together, synthesised, in a poem which closes “He held a black bible and waved it about / as he sang and danced around the hotel room / until the holy book opened its paper aeroplane wings / and my father flew off, his white dress trailing / like smoke in the sky, all the lovely stitches, dropping // dropping like silver threads on the dark red land.”

Carol Ann Duffy is a poet who has changed and developed over the years. I had thought of her as a poet capable of great intensity of feeling and language, with the language tending to hang rather loosely and rhetorically when the intensity of feeling was lacking. What strikes me first about her new collection Rapture (Picador) is its professionalism – the variety and mastery of forms and of rhymes and half rhymes, the consistent tone and flow within each poem, the poise, the way the collection as a whole hangs together as an account of many aspects of loving someone.

This does not result in poems of an even quality. In the weaker ones there is a certain discrepancy between the intensity of feeling described and the composure of the description. We are looking less at human emotions than at carefully formed poetic objects, distanced from us, sequestered behind the glass of their imperturbability. The language never exactly fails but it can lack immediacy. “Then I can look love full in the face, see / who you are I have come this far to find, the love of my life” may very well be true but does it convince us of its truth? When she writes “Falling in love / is a glamorous hell; the crouched parched heat / like a tiger ready to kill; a flame’s fierce licks under the skin”, I am not convinced that this tiger is capable of killing anyone. It is more of a property tiger, appropriately placed in a tableau of images.

But the best of the poems escape these limitations. Forest is a metaphor for love and tells how her lover led her into it. The extended metaphor frees the poet’s imagination – ‘The moon tossed down its shimmering cloth. We undressed, / then dressed again in the gowns of the moon. We knelt in the leaves, / kissed, kissed; new words rustled nearby and we swooned.” Bridgewater Hall and Cuba are among those with the specificity of place and detail which the weaker poems lack. The mundane details of Cuba cannot of themselves account for its success – such things are the common coin of modern poetry. What makes the poem remarkable is the density of poetic thought compressed within the short space of a sonnet – the selection of the details, their emotional loading and implication, the slant references to death, the metaphors and similes, the emphases given by the internal rhymes – and then the way all these details and images are drawn into one flow, one tone. There are many poets who can think of a striking detail or image for every one who can subsume it to larger purposes. This poem reminds me of how Baudelaire’s alexandrines can absorb and transform the most unpromising urban detritus. Such an achievement is more than simply aesthetic – it symbolises the mastery of the mind over its disparate contents. One can be too masterful over such contents and lose emotional contact with them, as some of these poems do, but in the best of them the real feeling remains, and the conclusion of Cuba is all the more poignant for the integration of what precedes it. It is an achievement that goes beyond professionalism – one word for it is maturity:

     No getting up from the bed in this grand hotel
     and getting dressed, like a work of art
     rubbing itself out. No lifting the red rose
     from the room service tray when you leave,
     as though you might walk to the lip of a grave
     and toss it down. No glass of champagne, left
     to go flat in the glow of a bedside lamp,
     the frantic bubbles swimming for the light. No white towel,
     strewn, like a shroud, on the bathroom floor.
     no brief steam on the mirror there for a finger
     to smudge in a heart, an arrow, a name. No soft soap
     rubbed between four hands. No flannel. No future plans.
     No black cab, sad hearse, on the rank. No queue there.
     No getting away from this. No goodnight kiss. No Cuba.

I found David Harsent’s Legion (Faber) immensely invigorating. The Legion sequence which forms its first and most important section has a subject ever more close to home, namely war. This is an outstandingly forceful, bold and successful treatment. It is not based on any particular war but on much that modern conflicts have in common.

The sequence is divided into sections marked by italicised extracts from Dispatches from combatants, the more effective for being cut into sections and leaving much to the imagination, as in:

     during which the guards took real delight
                            on a concrete floor
     soon running with their own
                            down like dogs, father and daughter,
     mother and son, or taken out to the block where
                the report states, amid ‘general laughter’.

Between these Dispatches are reports from the worlds where the fighting takes place: in Patrol, “children stock still in the shadows, / a rush-light behind the grille of the ‘facility for widows’”; in Daisychain the village which sees the smoke of the enemy, so that many of the women kill themselves, but the enemy bypasses them and vanishes; in Chinese Whispers a series of vignettes of which the first is “They told us about the boy who disappeared / when the convoy went through. Search / as they might there was no sign until word / was sent of ‘residue’ between the wheel and the wheel-arch.” Here is The Wall, particular and real, but less a simple description than an evocation, a drawing together and consolidation of much that we have read or experienced, its final couplet capable of a literal interpretation but suggestive beyond the literal.

     A milky, dead-eye sky. That steel-and-cordite smell
     you get with a lightening strike. Ripples underfoot. A taste
     of nickel behind your tongue. The best and last
     grouped on the far side, waiting to go to the wall,
     their voices just a dim hubbub at first,
     like something on the boil,
     then raised in a sudden awkward cheer, then still.

     Soon after which (we should have guessed)
     the first hint of that unearthly weather; a test
     of music in summer orchards, birdsong, a single bell
     tolling at dusk over ploughland, over watermeadows: all
     we have learnt, at length, to mistrust.
     You could hear it, low and visceral,
     coming in off the skyline, airborn and moving fast.

There are some fine poems in the remainder of the collection – I particularly liked At the Quayside – but David Harsent’s distinctive achievement is that he has measured up to an immense subject which increasingly impinges on our lives and the lives of others but that few contemporary poets have attempted. I hope the fact that Legion won the Forward Prize for best collection of the year will help to draw attention to this remarkable and timely work.