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

Mrs. Marvellous, Victoria Pugh, 2008, Two Rivers Press. £8 ISBN 978-1-90167775-7-7

Victoria Pugh’s eponymous poem Mrs Marvellous effectively sets the key-note of this collection, which might be summed up as ‘the sting in the tail’. To me Mrs Marvellous is the mother-figure who takes self-sacrifice too far, “She jumped from a crane – was crushed on the pavement // That was enough. / Thank you, Mrs. Marvellous”. Inventive and skilful, using familiar settings like supermarket and department store, Pugh modernises the technique of fable and creates a deceiving world where, alerted by her laconic style, we are primed for the trip-wire. Here, love, and fantasies about love, disappoint: “The little bristles on his chin / were so sharp / they pierced her heart. / Now they rub her / up the wrong way”; old age sneaks up on those in their prime; the solid world becomes scary, “She’d seen / a crack in the universe that anyone can fall in”; reliable people become dependent; people who kneel before you turn out to be kneeling on you ... Clearly, there’s a limit to the technique but Pugh offers relief: while irony predominates, some poems express gentle regret, such as sensitive poems about ageing and dying, Nude and Friend. Some highly inventive poems are surreal: “And he emptied the box of teeth / all over the bed. // He pulled out a drawer / and tipped the contents on the floor. // He found: // A pendant made of plastic / with a crab trapped inside it.” (You Are What You Keep). This is an interesting, original and sometimes deeply moving first collection.