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

ORCHARD END, Peter Redgrove, Stride £7.50

WHAT THE BLACK MIRROR SAW, Peter Redgrove, Stride £8.50

     Redgrove writes as an overt shaman, and so it’s not metaphor when he a writes ‘We discuss/ In whispers the spirituous dark/ Within the fruit’.

     He’s announcing to an age swindled of magic that the Victorian conception of matter didn’t and doesn’t exist. He speaks as a prophet, and then the apple is both apple and metaphorical eye. They’re both to be opened by his poetry:

As an eye sleeps each apple
Sleeps in it seamless lid
Until I bite into the black, turning it
To white, saying
‘Let there be light.’

The message is, ‘sleepers awake’ - become more conscious of the weirdness of your universe -and also taste it:

The seven-year old girl
Walking through the downpour
Does the thing most acceptable to her
By strolling with her tongue poked out:
Tasting the rain to its roots.

     Weird and alarming as the universe is, it’s no weirder than ourselves and, to an extent, is ourselves:

My dog barked back
At the dog of the wind all night.

Humourously, seriously, defamiliarizing even dentistry, Redgrove, with his ritual name, gives us his own excitement. He’s like the birds who, after the heavy spring shower, call out ‘Still here! still here!’

     There’s so much in the poems - every stanza a poem, many of the poems montages - it’s fortunate most of them aren’t very long, and even the longer ones consist of short ones, loaded with observation, as though Redgrove had just been born, and with insight, as though he were incarnations-old. I shan’t try to read the poems quickly: I’m going to take them away with me and play with them - and with the short fictions and prose poems in What the Black Mirror Saw: ‘The miners in the tunnels under the Atlantic stopped work and listened to the great boulders above rolling over the seabed.’