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

Is it possible that publishers encourage poets to write too many poems in order to sell books? I couldn’t help wondering this as I began Alvi’s latest book. The first two thirds of the book is made up of a series of poems entitled: ‘The Further Adventures of the Souls’, apparently random ruminations and descriptions of the life and times of souls. The language is downbeat and tongue in cheek, almost like snippets from a larger speech or lecture. Alvi confidently starts her poem wherever she fancies:

All those passages and corridors,
deep red walls and indoor rivers.

So what does the soul
think of its temporary home,
the spongy,
          the leaky places
and the heart, like Big Ben
presiding over everything?

She is grappling with with complex issues here; this idea that we ‘posess’ a soul is both ridiculous and utterly convincing. There is something, be it a life force or the wind blowing through the open sleeves of a shirt on a washing line, that can jog the heart, and it is this ‘something’ that Alvi attempts to catch in her poems.

     A mixture of wit, bravado and instinct, inform these quirky, surreal fables, which, I’m sure, will amuse a lot of readers. The souls are restless, amorphous creatures, who get married and divorced, are good travellers, good lovers and good sports. Yet despite the relentlessly playful tone I think many of the poems are about loneliness and dislocation. My favourites from this section are the ones which move imaginatively between reality and fiction, synthesising objects and feelings together in new ways as in this extract from ‘Lovers’

Fortunate souls have countless lovers.
The silver birches love them.

The fat sizzling in the pan.
The alphabet loves them, even the rarer letters,

and the vacancies between words.

     Alvi’s work is fluid and flexible, and, always the mark of an accomplished poet, her best work appears effortless. However, I was glad to reach the final third of the book where the poems are to be found free standing and not roped to any theme. ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, displays Alvi’s precise and sumptous imagery, inspired by a painting by Dorothea Tanning, it is a meditation on one aspect of the mother and daughter relationship, the painful necessity of letting go:

You can lock the doors, even
bolt the air, but there’s no way
of keeping your daughters in at night..

Stars glint like metal in their hair.
The darkness, fine as artists’ ink,
seeps into their nightclothes.
If you follow them down the path -
you turn to stone.

This, together with ‘The House with one Window’, seem to me to be the outstanding poems of this collection. ‘The House with one Window’ explores the nature of death from a child’s perspective, in a marvellous and enticing manner. It is beautifully simple in style, it welcomes you directly to the inner world of a child, it is truthful without being mawkish or the least sentimental. It tells you what you already know in a way that makes you feel you have discovered it for yourself. It is a remarkable poem and the book could be bought for it alone.