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

Sunlight in a Champagne Glass – William Oxley; Rockingham Press, £7.99

There’s a lot to admire in this selection of poems. My favourite was Sun, in which Oxley deprecates this source of life because “Nothing has ever lived there:/ no astonished witness/ of its magma flowers / no young girl to / rush breathlessly through its burning fields/ joyfully” before advising readers to instead turn to the harmless light of the mind’s imagination.

Before this come some sea poems, one of which, I felt, slipped close to doggerel with lines such as: “then Summer soon, or even late/ will now insist we celebrate.” But there are some real gems. Humour appears occasionally and is done well, as in Café Mythos, in which heroes of the classical world are portrayed as denizens of a cheap café. There is also The Office Stiff – don’t ask! The poet’s relationship with his father comes through strongly and no better than in Memory, Snowflakes with its “Recapturing the past in words’ strange gleam”. Then comes a clutch of telling anti-war poems.

The book ends with a series of fifteen poems entitled Rooms. The one I liked most is The Unwinding Room, with its refrain “I came of age in that back dining room” and the description of a mother who once “washed herself from the room in a flood of tears”. But Oxley seems occasionally to slip into the prosaic, as in, a few lines later, “an intellectual-imaginative curiosity which has stayed with me…”. Often we find a wonderful poetic sensibility and turn of phrase spoiled by proximity to a cliché or uninspired bit of fact, as in The Orchid Room, where a conservatory is beautifully evoked as “the eye of a diamond out of which vein-tongued leaves flame on stems”, only for us then to be told they “grow incredibly flora-rich.”

These poems are evocative of time and place and many have a fin de siècle atmosphere to them – one which can occasionally seem mean-spirited towards the younger generation, as in Made not Born. But I felt I wanted to spend more time with the poet as we progress into what he describes as “a new and aimless millennium.”