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

There are many mind-provoking comments made about poetry. Horace asserts that its purpose is ‘to delight and instruct at once’. There is Shelley’s wonderful idea of it as ‘a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted’. Gertrude Stein defines it as the ‘calling upon names’. I especially like Ezra Pound’s, ‘Poetry is a centaur. The thinking wordarranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties’.

   Indeed, as Torriano supporters know well, poetry is important and loved – a fact once again evidenced by the success of the 2007 Torriano Poetry Competition which attracted over 650 poems and made £750 to help Torriano’s funds.

   You only have to go to one of the well-attended poetry events on Sundays to see the importance of this venue to the London scene. Of course, Torriano Meeting House supports many other events besides poetry ones and it has come to represent passion and commitment to the arts, drawing in people from its Camden base but from other parts of London as well.

   A special thanks from June English, my fellow-adjudicator and myself, to all who entered the Competition, now in its third year, and to Diana Baggs, our Competition Secretary, for making it a great success. – Katherine Gallagher

   The winning poem ‘Amor Amor’ (after Garcilaso de la Vega) by Gwyneth Box is a sonnet, in which mood, meaning and form are stitched ‘feelingly’ together. The octave begins with the words, ‘Love offered me a cloth so fine and rich’, which immediately pins the abstract of the opening word ‘Love’ to a concrete image: ‘a cloth so fine and rich’ and this, within the space of another line, is ‘sewed’ into a ‘habit’. A word that suggests both the ideals, the sacredness of marriage and the boring routine of ‘a garment’ that ‘shrinks with daily use.’ until gradually, tightlycorseted within the confines of the rhymes, the picture of a suffocating marriage is both ‘lived’ and revealed. This, as the sestet reveals, is not a poem of hope or change, but a believable and very human portrayal of loyalty and hard-won acceptance...

   Carol DeVaughn’s poem ‘Hag’ also looks below the surfaces of life. The opening lines, ‘The bag lady’s got us fooled/by her gabbling, her toothless grin/and lunatic gaze...’ is, we are told, ‘the perfect cover/for a goddess...’. The fast-flowing, three line stanza effortlessly creates that numinous air of change, until, ‘At twilight she’ (the bag lady) becomes the city’s / balance, her ancient spine pivotal / to the weighing up of things...’ This is a poem that seeks, finds and portrays the mercurial hot-pot of womanhood, the love, the hate, the fury that has fed into our psyche... I love it.

   Sue Butler’s ‘What’s Best?’ is from start to finish, a moving understatement of a retold wartime experience. There is a stark beauty in the words that lends a cold reality to their meaning. The scene opens with, ‘A blue door’. which has, the poet tells us, little ‘to distinguish it / from a rural dispensary Chekhov would recognize’.

   The first question that sprung to my mind was, ‘Why Chekhov? What’s he doing here? But the picture it evokes of a rural surgery, one that Chekhov as a country doctor would be familiar with, adds a simple credence to the poet’s words. The second was something that Chekhov once said: ‘If you introduce a gun in the first act of a play, it must go off in the final one.’

   This is a poem written in a skillfully-controlled style, with a fire and feeling that allows the reader to smell the ‘bucket half full of diesel’, and sweat with the doctor as he saws through Ilyas’ mutilated legs. And, as gruelling image follows gruelling image and the odds against Ilyas’ recovery worsen, my mind shot back to Chekhov and the gun! Sure enough, it goes off in the final stanza, ‘and should he (Ilyas) pull through, it’s best / if you explain.’

   Karen Green’s ‘Reading Glasses’ is a strong and pensive poem. The octave explores the situation: this is a woman who, like many of us, has ‘stopped fighting the grey’. A woman who in her private moments, sees her father or grandmother’s ‘close-lipped’ reflection looking back at her from the mirror as if they are ‘grooming me for a
seniority / that’s hard to merit.’ The simplicity of the language, and clever, unobtrusive rhyming all add to an underlying uneasiness. This is a quiet poem, but careful in its choosing and using of material. The
ending is hopeful: the poet finds and recentres herself through her reconnection with the ‘child’ in her, the child who can ‘unravel curious tangles’ ‘using only a pin and those two good eyes’. – June English