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

Lack of space in this issue prevents us reviewing at any length some of the good books that have been published in recent months. Rather than say no thing about them, I shall at least mention some of them here, but very briefly. Further publication details of each one can be found in our ‘Books and Magazines Received’ section at the end of this issue.

     First of all, anyone interested in new and exciting British poetry should get at once Pierre Joris’ Antlers and Allen Fisher’s Long Shout to Kernewek. Both of these are from a new imprint, New London Pride Editions. The process behind Allen Fisher’s work should also be read in his compendium of notes and drafts and workings in Prosyncel (Strange Faeces Press, USA). Another new press which has so far produced two good, neat pamphlets of poetry is the Skylark Press, with their editions of Paul Evans’ Prokofiev’s Concerto and William Corbett’ s City Nature both well worth reading.

     David Miller is becoming a fine poet, producing continually interesting work, as anyone can see from his two recent volumes, All My Life (Joe DiMaggio Press) and The Caryatids (Enitharmon Press), as well as from his prose collage, South London Mix (Gaberbocchus).

     Lee Harwood has also shown us recently where his work is going to next in two short selections from his new work in progress, ‘Notes of a Post Office Clerk’ in Freighters (Pig Press) and in Poetry Review (Vol 65 No 4). His Selected Poems of Tristan Tzara (Trigram) is a unique addition to our stock of foreign literature in English. Another similarly fine edition is John Porter’s translation of Beowulf, the first parallel text of this work for over 70 years, and, incidentally, a printing masterpiece in this Pirate Press edition. Both this and the Tzara volume ought to be bought up instantly by all university English and French departments.

     Translated poetry has been particularly lucky recently. Anvil Press Poetry have again done some excellent work in this field with their volumes of Johannes Bobrowski (From the Rivers), Antonin Bartusek (The Aztec Calendar), and Nichita Stanescu (The Still Unborn About The Dead). Not content with these, Anvil have also produced two highly original volumes of poetry in English - John Matthias’ Turns and Dick Davis’ In The Distance. I must mention here also Tangent’s (another new press) edition of The Moonlight Sonata, a long narrative poem by Yannis Ritsos.

     And, if you want to be made to think, read Stefan Themerson’s essays in On Semantic Poetry (Gaberbocchus), in which ideas explode like fireworks from every page and manage to be both entertaining and well-written at the same time.

     Finally, as far as books are concerned, from Black Sparrow in America comes an Important addition to our knowledge of contemporary US poetry - Jack Spicer’s Collected Books (edited by Robin Blaser with a long essay by him on Spicer and his work, as well as several appendices of interesting marginalia), where all this seminal poet’s work can now be read at once.

     As for magazines, I must single out three. New Departures has surfaced again with a magnificent quadruple (Ithink) issue which, almost literally, contains everything and everyone, a kind of compendium of all that’s been exciting In poetry over the last ten years or so. In the last five months, Poetry Review has also produced two very stimulating issues in which one can find some of the most important poetry now being produced In English, from both sides of the Atlantic. The latest issue of Poetry Information (No 14) re-affirms the key role that this magazine is now starting to play in the poetry world in this country.

     Each of the above books and magazines deserves a long review to itself. When one realizes that all of them have appeared in the last six or seven months (and for the rest see the list of received items that follows), it should be immediately obvious that good poetry is not dead as some have claimed. Indeed, on the contrary, it is thriving, but thanks only to the continued activity and dedication of the little presses of this country. While the establishment presses form consortia to survive, and squabble about their shares of a market which they continually claim is shrinking to non-existence, the little presses have got on with proper business of publishing, and selling, the good work that is still being written.