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

Dinah Livingstone’s passion, intellectuality and lightly-worn erudition fire a plain speech. With the equipment of an aesthete but a politically compassionate heart, she’s been ‘committed’ - to things that are now ‘history’ in a world constantly revising itself. Even her Catholicism, to which she was a convert, is history:

I am glad there is no God here
requiring attention in this garden.
Just the garden itself, which does
and I who do.

     The title of a poem with the epigraph “In the beginning was the word” is ‘She mutters at the Dustbin’. It truly is about the love of words.

Once I almost went to bed
with a man who told me
about Arabic gutturals.
And in Berlin I nearly died
when this voice of iron and purest vowels
pronounced Die Schlüterstrasse.

‘Twisty’ not ‘twisted’ is the mot juste in “Between twisty oaks in the goblin wood...”

     There is every sort of poem here, including good love poems, and they record a lifelong search for ‘ways’: seeking without finding, but a big adventure, which is, after all, the point of all ‘Ithacas’. Her senses are too much alive for her not to be a nature poet as well, though the nature may be in Camden Town and will resonate with much more than nature. By a splendid country Rowan Tree, which, as for True Thomas, marked the choice of ways -

I kept still, filled my eyes,
listened to water,
and for red deer,
waited to be told. What?

When the bright ordeal burnt out
I munched cold bun and cheese.
Later in London another rowan
shone among drab donkey brown
of terraces and pavement slabs
recently rinsed by rain.
Clearer with second sight.

     Dinah Livingstone was a star, along with Madge Herron, at Norman Hidden’s often fiery ‘Workshop’ readings at the Lamb and Flag, St Martin’s Lane, in the late sixties and seventies. She was involved in the RC/Marxist South American liberation theology, is still linked to that part of the world through her numerous translations from Spanish, and has steadily been producing books and booklets since, often from her own Katabisis Press. In a time when women poets can be easily overrated, here is one who ought to be still better known.