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

Hurrah – another bumper crop of new writing to keep you occupied on those long summer evenings spent indoors, watching the rain skid down the windowpanes, the garden edging closer, the floodwaters rising. (That’s if you’re in the UK of course – elsewhere I hear the
summer’s been a scorcher.) Perhaps it’s the apocalyptic rhetoric of the times – global warming, the war on terror, the rise of China – or the inevitable preoccupation of writers grappling with truth, meaning and the nature of existence or some dark mood sweeping over E17 where the Brittle Star editors hang out or simply the weather, but
death seems to be a bit of a theme in Issue 17.

   With the rigorously democratic Brittle Star selection process – all the editors read everything and then we argue over what we like and dislike until eventually we have a yes pile we’re all reasonably happy with – we were as surprised as anyone to discover at the end of a long afternoon just how many of the pieces we’d chosen dealt with the subject. But they do so in oh so many different ways: from Phil Poole’s achingly honest essay on his late friend Phil Malleson via Robin Lindsay Wilson’s mysterious prose poem ‘The Bogyman Arrives at an Objective Point of View’ and Daniel Andersson’s
wry quatrain ‘Forecast’ to ‘Her Last Day’, Anne Ryland’s account of her mother’s final hours, celebratory in its vigour and sense of wonder. So death, yes, rather a lot for a summer issue, but nothing
relentlessly downcast or depressing in the pages that follow.

   And there’s much else besides. Anne Stewart offers a delighted appreciation of the Tom Raworth poem, ‘Three’ – ‘I’m still enjoying the sheer beauty of it’ she says in her final paragraph. David Floyd,
deadpan as ever, focuses his ‘Reader’s Diary’ on gangster novels, Gordon Brown and great literature. There are poems from writers as far flung as Ireland and Argentina and Brittle Star welcomes its very first prose writing Rising Star, my Japanese friend Aoi Matsushima, with her short story ‘A Heart in the Sea’.

   I’ve known Aoi since we both did a Masters in creative writing at Bath Spa nearly ten years ago and we’ve read and commented upon each other’s work often since then. Good writing friendships are invaluable, they offer support, community, feedback, an audience, but, as Phil Poole’s essay shows, they can be complex too. Even more so if you happen to be involved in editing a magazine that publishes new writing. Is it ok to promote a friend’s work, I worried, when Aoi’s name was suggested as a Rising Star. Given the rigours of the Brittle Star selection process, I think it is, provided the work is good and the magazine is equally willing to publish the work of all the new writers out there who are not yet friends.