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

By chance, all three collections grab their readers with eyes. On Polly Clark’s cover the eyes inhabit a girl with a faraway gaze; Clare Pollard’s eye, with its insistent pupil, could double as a chicken’s pecking head; and Angela Kirby’s graffiti image lures from a heart of Prussian blue. It doesn’t take long to discover that Mr Irresistible of Kirby’s title, the “last / and only faithful lover”, is death, but there’s a twist; death wooed so sexily hints also at le petit mort.

   Memories of growing up on a farm, the youngest child of Catholic parents, evidently dictated Kirby’s future. Indeed, “Eight of us” becomes almost a refrain for this bulging family of untouching parents surrounded by nature’s flirtation. This is where the singing begins – heyoop, flick-clack, immaculate – as do religious intensity, respect for family community and the habit of delving for secrets in the commonplace. Where life flows into horticulture and comestibles there is a special vibrancy. Onward marches the frank, questioning child, a stubborn presiding figure who nurtures, mediates, questions and challenges, retaining humour through various deaths, a disintegrating marriage and a new relationship. The collection reads like autobiography and its strength is the forthrightness and compassion.

   To be seventy is inevitably to experience loss. Besides parents, deaths are recorded of a child, brother, lover, friends, even Guy Fawkes. Occasions variously prolonged, accepted, dreamed, railed at, and terrorised, include one or two that leave the reader in horror at their protracted pain. In a moving elegy (Brain Coral), a hospital visitor bears a wildflower posy from the garden that retains a physical simulacrum of his partner, but his partner’s loss of memory, probably with Alzheimer’s, means that not much remains on which their worlds once hung together. A geological specimen, riddled with holes, forms a concrete metaphor for the last shaky link.

   Kirby’s poems are consistently crafted with buoyant internal rhymes. A few incorporate scientific detail (The Ptilinorhynchidae and I ). Midnight at the Embassy is an original dream of jealousy, and Floating Islands charts the progress of six whisked eggs, a “small blizzard of blossom” presented to grandchildren garnished with wild strawberries. The text is sprinkled with colloquialisms that accent modernity or possibly a slightly ‘county’ idiom: “What the hell”, “We all had a ball”, “If you hadn’t screwed up”, “some old fart we’d known”.

   Though poem after poem reinforces wonder for the natural world in sometimes lush imagery, this eye looks through no misted screen of remembered moments. Because “hanging about” interferes with getting on with things that matter, the eye resents doing so; open- minded, direct, it faces what comes.

   Clare Pollard’s third collection spins from a six-month world trip with a travel grant from the Society of Authors. She “wanted to write a long poem which engaged with what she saw and felt ....” – Bangkok, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, three for Thailand and so on, until four lines for Singapore Airport catapult arrival in the relatively westernised Antipodes. A poem for each place that drums beneath the surface is asking a lot. This is not, in any case, what she sets out to do. With an alert eye to fake or trendy and pertinent jabs about what went or goes on behind the veneer in some of these locations, she describes what is unashamedly a whistlestop tour. “Other animals do not need a purpose in life ... Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?” Does “seeing” at its most superficial, necessarily add anything? The opening quote from John Gray’s Straw Dogs fails to give confidence.

   Pollard is good on the Cambodian killing fields where she retires into imagination: “It is hard, in the space of a field, / its small, dug plots, its sane green, / to picture...” In China, more typically, cluttered corners bearing caged birds “twitchy and puppeted” are incongruously centred on Starbucks with its “regulation cups”. Legitimately, she objects to ways in which the country behaves towards its radicals, “skies so full of filth the stars were all put out ...” with a final aside “with all this harm done / can it really come all right in the end?” It is difficult not to find the naiveté of tone on such a serious subject flippant.

   The second section, ‘The World and I’, begins with a rhymed poem of three uneven stanzas addressing a mountain range in China, part of an ancient pilgrim path (To Hua Shan) – another huge topic tackled by the disappointingly tripping: “I will not go from here until / I’ve stood upon your northern peak / beside the monastery, too weak / to really take the landscape in – / what is it that I think I’ll win? / Why do we call this holiness?”

The third section takes the reader home to the discovery that the poet’s father is seriously ill. The Beginning of the End wraps in global warming with the embrace of friends and a walk into air-conditioned supermarkets. It is worth holding on to three bold single-syllable words – “yolk”, “gold”, “stone” – in juxtaposition, good words in context of a possible “beginning”, though a pregnancy turns out to be no more than a scare. A long culminating poem skitters back and forth from the beginning of the year in Beijing to the poet’s father’s funeral on New Year’s Day. Festivals pivot memory as Heaney so poignantly suggests in Holly, making a specific New Year also every remembered one. Pollard’s hindsight finds a New Year that was more distinctive than the numbing present, when she was bundled across the road “fuzzy and cradled – / through that eerie stooped world of cat’s stares and lamp glow / on our nighties and naked toes”. Despite the occasionally evident ‘way with words’, one wonders if this kind of poem, raw, rushed, sentimental, essentially contemporary and above all, personal, comes from a writer trying too hard to impress an audience.

   Through splits and dualities in her poetic voice, Polly Clark is for ever playing games – owning and disowning parts of herself; distinguishing logos or intellectual life, and mythos which is emotional and replenishing; adopting male, female, animal or even inorganic personae. Her poems are about identity, breaking barriers and reaching out, which can also, paradoxically, be a withdrawal into something bigger – space that rolls in dreamlike as the sea. Blackish humour runs through a collection in which dislocation is further emphasised by interrupted italicised remarks. ‘Do you ever think your life would make more sense without you in it?’ (XX)

   We are in Rome where sun “crawling in the ruins” sets the stage for a somewhat rootless pair of protagonists. The variety of personal pronouns alert the reader to the sort of muddle 21st century relationships are apt to convey. Typically, playfulness disguises seriousness; atypically for Clarke, there is not a drop of water around. Elsewhere the poet uses wetness in all its forms – raindrop, rockpool, lake, sea, birdbath – to reflect emotion. As a metaphor for mind, water harbours memory (“lost property”) for selection, processes what has accumulated and flings it up to consciousness. What is swept along the surface. What inhabits shallows. What lurks in the dark underbelly? In two poems based in Scotland, Loch Long becomes the reservoir in which Clark explores relationships. The reader will find few politics or public themes, but quite a bit of darkness. Though not confessional and the furthest from experience of the three volumes, the work is as personal as it could be, all the animals and places being analogues of the poet and her art.

   Beguiling views of goat, hedgehog, swan and octopus home in on facets of the species’ personality and behaviour that are shared by the poet. “In dreams I take her with me / tightly in my arms / and I set her gently down / wherever lawns have lost their mind.” (Nibbling).

   Like any poet, Clark wants to keep things alive through words. Fishing Boat is a poem that marks moments of childhood first from the inside, then from an outsider’s perspective. The result is an unsettling distancing similar to that evoked by a ventriloquist’s dummy.

   Poems in the second section root about with immense subtlety among the dilemmas that changes in lifestyle present to others: “I’m so tired, darling, tired.” (Dumbarton). A bottle bank, for instance, becomes a metaphor for demands made by intimacy that clash with a poet’s intense need to cultivate his or her own small garden. Anyone who thinks the way in which a poet lives matters will understand the depths of pleas for isolation and of guilt incurred. Childlike but never, remotely, childish, the poet speaks: “But as I slowly press these walls / like Alice in her Wonderland / who was a child, then suddenly did not fit her life / I know that ...” (Two Views of a Submarine). “You have to bow to those strong enough / to leave themselves behind” (Oxford Bus).