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

We have accumulated a fair few festive poems on the magazines site over time. It is a popular theme with poets, although they don't very often seem to be in favour of it.

Here are a few we've picked out. Just click on a piece of text to view the whole poem. You can also search the full range of Christmas poems in our archive by clicking here.

Shona Kerr-Hill, a contributor to a 1987 issue of the Smith/Doorstop Books magazine The North, takes us Christmas shopping in the 80s:

          We stagger carrier-bagged-up
          with things that no one wants
          but that they're getting...

               'Christmas Shopping'

Scottish Salt poet Rob A. Mackenzie gives us a nightmarish vision of a Christmas Market in a 2009 issue of Templar / University of Gloucestershire based magazine Iota:

                                                  In my sleep,
          radiators clank tills and trolleys spill

          onto horror aisles where Barbie dolls
          squeal Fairytale of New York all night
          in harsh mono...

               'The Christmas Market'
 
A more sedate view now, in this delightful wintery haiku from a 2006 issue of the British Haiku Society journal Blithe Spirit, written by Japanese poet Kohjin Sakamoto:

          its journey from the heaven
                 now ends in my palms…
                       the snowflake

               'Winter'

Bloodaxe poet Clare Pollard pops up in a 1997 issue of Magma, (when she was then still an A Level student in Bolton), to give us an Angel Song which opens memorably with the line:

          This fir-tree point could impale.

               'Angel Song'

With similar bleakness, Northern Irish Picador poet Leontia Flynn explores Christmas in the city, as published in a 2006 issue of New Welsh Review. She takes the view that:

          Christmas has come, like Cholera, to town.

               'A Poem for Christmas'

Alternatively you could enjoy various festive haiku from a 2006 issue of Blithe Spirit, the Journal of the British Haiku Society from Edinburgh poet John McDonald and Dutch poet Hans Reddingius:

          Read John McDonald's Christmas lights here.

          Read Hans Reddingius's festive squirrel haiku here.

Wildlife poet, and now poet in residence for the Born Free Foundation, Richard Bonfield looks to nature in a 2006 issue of traditionalist metrical and rhyme poetry magazine Candelabrum:

          What are the geese pulling
          Through the frosted air?

          They are pulling Winter
          On her painted sledge...

               'Christmas gift'

Helston poet Bryan Teague mourns the loss of Christmas trees past in a poem from a 2009 issue of Poetry Cornwall:

          On Christmas Eve my Dad would disappear 
          On a secret mission to the woods, to top 
          A holly tree and trim some berried twigs...

               'The Christmas Tree'
 

Canadian poet and playwright Kim Morrissey looks at the foods, drinks and spices of Christmas in a 2007 issue of Painted, Spoken, an occasional little magazine.

          You are there 

          baking for Christmas, siphoning 
          wine in the afternoon

          laughing at The Singer Not the Song
          your first schoolgirl crush

               'For Serena'

German-born poet Lotte Kramer, in a 1998 issue of international poetry magazine The Interpreter's House, has this poignant piece about Christmas cards:

          Slip through the letter box with messages:
          Some bland, some more intense, some aching with
          Bereavements, wives abandoned, loss of jobs.

          The annual contact on a patient card.
          ‘See you next year’ some say and quite forget
          Before the ink is dry.

               'Christmas Cards'

And, last but not least, here is the original Scots Makar Edwin Morgan's classic 'The Computer's First Christmas Card', written in 1968 and this version (with typed and handwritten versions) published in Second Aeon by Peter Finch in 1973:

          jollymerry
          hollyberry
          jollyberry
          merryholly
          happyjolly
          jollyjelly...

               'The Computer's First Christmas Card'
 

Enjoy the festive season!