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

This is a substantial book with extracts from Garfitt’s journals, reflecting on life in the North of England before and after his wife Frances Horovitz’s death, and on life in Colombia. The persona’s sufferings are only implied, but they reinforce contemplation:

     The Celtic saints used to look for their place of resurrection, a solitary place on the foreshore, where they could build a beehive cell and pass their days in prayer and fasting. I did not find mine until I went to Colombia seven years ago... In the new world the ground was still whole under my feet. It was as if Frances never died, because Frances never lived here.

     It’s a book of awareness, inner and outer. In ‘From inside my eyes, looking out’ (1970) Garfitt echoes Blake’s “I see through not with the eyes”. The line evolves into “From inside my eyes, looking in” and then picks up the gaze of the lover, who also is looking “from inside yourself, looking out”. They’re not only looking but sharing each others’ eyes and what they see. “Instinct has an eye in the silence, an ear for the dark”.

     ‘Prayer to the Sun’ is translated from the native American:

...Give me my white cloud over and over,
old soul with the fiery head.
Give me your golden shelter for ever,
great knife of gold in whose gleam
we stand here on earth.

     Garfitt envies the painters who “don’t hunch over their ideas, hiding them away in notebooks as poets do”. “They pin them up on the wall and look at them”. This is a quiet book of the hushed reflections “the writing lamp throws on the wall”. But it’s also a book of pub scenes, army poems, observed characters, poems written for jazz settings, Border Songs (engraved on glass screens).

     Garfitt has been writing not massively but professionally for over thirty years. He’s the genuine not the hyped thing, producing poetry when the poetry itself asks to be produced, and this selection shows a dedicated craftsman at work on a slightly other-wordly inspiration.