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

William Oxley’s collection spans a similar period to that of David Grubb’s, but is much slimmer. His preoccupations too are those of the older poet - memories, the state of the world, tributes to colleagues, religious epiphanies in familiar places, the classics etc. Again it’s not too easy to trace out the evolution of his thought or technique (he presents his most recent poems first). There are some fine poems from various dates ‘And The Leaves Fall In Silence’ (1997- 2000) and the wonderful ‘Falling Inwards Like The Sand’ (1993), ‘The Lane’, (1983), and (parts of) ‘To Lily’ (1981). But there’s a feeling throughout that the poet is less than driven to refinement; that he’ll grab at the epigrammatic rather than give an idea its proper attention - “The immense contradiction of experience and love” (!) from ‘A Stab At (sic!) Chelsea’ - or opt for the facetious tone, as in ‘Turn Up For The Book’ (an Odysseus poem), rather than engage with the significance that led him to choose the subject; the recourse to the hyphenated adjective: “wind-charmed”, “sea-embued”, “wave-milked” etc.; or simply settling for the uncontroversial and affable tone as the ‘tourist’ poems about Katmandu or comments on life in ‘War in West Hampstead’. Nevertheless even if this is easy poetry it’s not careless poetry; and the whole is suffused with engagement with and love of people, memories and places. Here’s part of ‘Falling Inwards Like The Sand’:

And from the tilted headland
buttered with primrose and celandine
owning this scene of deep blue
richly-pacified sea, I am
obsessed with echoes of gone lives...

...and it is their simplicity
I am left to envy
before this empty frame of the sea
this summer’s bay
murmuring with water and light...

...their voices and images gone
forever into sepia’d memory,
falling inwards like the sand.