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

I anticipated that ‘spirit machines’ would be a synecdoche for another synecdoche, ‘human beings’. But actual machines are the thing, replacing men: CD Roms, cash machines, the internet. A compact disc, unlike a human being, “means I can never rearrange a sound”. Even money passes into cyberspace and becomes a machine spirit:

Promising always to pay the bearer, money
aspires to the condition of purest spirit.
Divesting itself of carnal assets, it sheds its
own metal and metal-stripped-paper body. It
passes like wild bees into the shadow screen.
In the silicate moonshine of e-mailed figures,
money resurrects...

Banking has changed since his father’s day. A cool generation, “Aliens who all looked like me”, replaced dad’s banking cronies with cash machines -

And mumbled electronic dialect,
Gawping at prehistoric, stacked punch-cards,
And ran our lives through personal organizers,
Then met the old only to smirk like misers,
Sussing their personal pension plans,
                                                   suggesting
Please insert your personal number,
And moved on fast because we hadn’t time.

     In this elegiac sequence the persona remembers his father’s life of work and responsibility:

You ticked a box for peeing on vitreous china,
Issuing a cheque, or ordering notes;
If your bus was late, a written explanation.

     But the poem appears to be less an elegy for his father than his father’s world, with “the tangible spirited away,/ Cybered in a world of light.” “In my father’s house are many mansions.” But if emotion is the same thing as sentimentality, then Crawford is very unsentimental. “If you let sorrow overcome you, you lose everything.”

     The mock question and answer test, ‘A Life-Exam’, is amusing.

...12. Have you broken the following Ten
Commandments? Answer each just yes or no.
24. With a view to bioengineering suggest at
least six names for new animals...
36. Describe the onset of your first period. OR
Avoid this subject entirely.

     I wish the rest of the book was as accessible. The longish ‘Impossibility’ unevenly describes the heroic struggles of Margaret Oliphant, a nineteenth century mother and writer, against pennilessness and tragedy. But, unlike the enthusiasts quoted in the blurb, I didn’t find it compelling. Is this “a poet of great importance”, as Iain Crichton Smith (and others) say? “Fluent, inventive, crackling with intellectual energy”: perhaps. “At the heart of our own time” - or, rather, limited aspects of it: yes. But very involving? It’s too overwritten. Where the poems are more simply-phrased (quite often), as in ‘Bereavement’, the poetry is more successful. ‘A Life-Exam’ asks: “1. Rewrite The Waste Land using only English words of one syllable.” But actually The Waste Land is deeply moving because, among other things, a lot of it is written in English words of one syllable, and because it’s not clotted with phrases like “protozoa’s luminescent wash”.