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

“Bitterland” is Bradford, and the book, about growing up under the Thatcher régime, is described as “the un-sentimental education of a natural outsider”. (She spent her infancy in other places, including Peru.)

     This is resolutely hardboiled narrative-reporting. The family does a moonlight flit from Essex to Bradford to escape unpaid rent and a shoplifting fine. Puberty is showing its first blood as the Yorkshire Ripper works: “The Ripper: score 13. The police: score Nil”. Grownups, boys and men behave contemptibly, not fooling the girls. The heroine admires the poster of a dancer she knows she’ll never be like, knowing she’ll never able to escape herself or her life. But the tough talk protects a sensitive girl who wants to get out but never does. She even fancies Muslim boys, though one tries to rape her.

     Art school, dole, learning to work and working are as disillusioning as sex. There is a spell working in a nursing home - “Billy swallows down/ another stiff custard-clot of phlegm” - and as a waitress in a casino. The sexual encounters are driven by contempt and hatred. The nearest thing to Romance (a hopeless mirage) is a gynaecological examination.

     This is pretty rough stuff - “lacerating candour is her means of freeing herself and burning through to celebrate the human spirit”, reports the novelist Bill Broady on the cover. Writing it is no doubt an important reminder of what we’re doing to ourselves, and reading it is undoubtedly easier than living it; but it leaves you with a bad feeling about being human.