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

Ruth Valentine: The Tide Table. London: Slow Dancer, £6.99.
Tamar Yoseloff: Sweetheart. London: Slow Dancer, £6.99.

     These two first collections from Slow Dancer Press are temptingly packaged. Well laid out, the cover illustration of each tastefully implies the mysteries of a female body “between covers”, without quite resorting to sex-to-sell. Both titles, too, have about them a bitter-sweet suggestion of timelessness and temporality, the ebb of feminine emotion and lapse into archetype.

     This mixture, though, proves hard to swallow. Plangency is no longer a requirement of women’s writing and, however tendentious the prose of the Radio Four short story, has rarely been characteristic of British women’s poetry. (Some Anglo-Welsh writers – Gillian Clarke and Ann Cluysenaar spring to mind – may be exceptions to this rule.) It’s dangerous, however, to judge a book by its cover; and though Ruth Valentine’s style does indeed seem at times more indebted to Edna than Sean O’Brien, there are passages of real strength in both these collections.

     Of the two, though, it is Tamar Yoseloff whose style is the more richly suggestive. This is rangy, rhythmically understated writing of the kind you will enjoy if you respond to prose poetry. The opening of ‘Driven’, for example, cruises away from the kerb in excellent time:

I remember the instructor saying
my three-point turn was perfect,
my parallel parking the best he’d ever seen.

The trouble is, as we discover at the next line (“He passed me and I never drove again”), that our inveterate pattern-making ear has coped with this rhythmic freedom by recruiting the “extra” foot of the third line as make weight for the three-footed second. Even the shift from anapaest to trochee has ample precedent and creates discomfort only when it turns out to follow no pattern.

     This isn’t of course to suggest that all verse should be formal, or that Yoseloff should abandon something so fundamental as her prosody. In many of these poems, such as ‘The Sighting of the Virgin in Marlboro Township, New Jersey’, whose narrative voice achieves an unclotted rendition of direct speech yet retains poetic coherence, this clearly American diction works as a real resource. In poems such as the beautifully-controlled ‘Cactusland’, about a greenhouse in Rutland, the transatlantic encounter informs contents too, with quietly decentring powers of observation. It’s just this suggestive power of form over content, though, which makes prosody such an issue here. At times, Yoseloff lets herself get away with too much that is prosaic. The end of ‘Driven’, for example, uses “as...to...as” not to tighten her image of coupledom against some alternative (the local/ the various/ darkness) but merely as conjunctions:

     and as you drive I can fall asleep to Glenn Gould
working through the Goldberg Variations,
as night darkens the motorway, cat’s eyes gleaming [...]

What holds this collection together above all is a set of thematic preoccupations, of which travelling is one, but which also include meat (‘Selfridges’, ‘The Butcher Cover’, ‘Fleet’); plague graveyards (the wonderfully-titled ‘The Cholera Graveyard’ and ‘Fleet’, again, with its echoes of U.A.Fanthorpe’s ‘Stations Underground’); plants and, oddly, skid row (‘Oscar’, ‘The Box’). More evidently personal – in a collection whose predominant use of the first person gives it an intimate, confessional tone – is the literally visceral poetry of ‘The Visible Man’ and ‘The Two Fridas’. Both pieces are strongly reminiscent of Ted Hughes’s Crow.

     Most successful are those poems, like ‘Deer’, which do more than merely repeat their premise:

Here in the dark trees
almost anything is possible.

This poem actualises possibility itself as well as any since Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, even while it goes on to contemplate the art of refusing that imaginative leap. The strongly-centred voice of ‘Donor’ and ‘Arrowhead’, too, allows the material world to lift off into the metaphorical. In these poems Yoseloff’s strong new presence is coming into its own.

     Ruth Valentine’s The Tide Timetable also includes pieces in which a laconic strength is fully achieved. In ‘Carl Gustav and the Cows’ the narrator, moved on by cattle, looks back and

there they were grazing nonchalantly, as if

they’d never heard of archetypes,
as if the numinous wouldn’t melt in their mouths.

This is well-organised writing, thick with a wit used so easily that the lines slip down like the butter that won’t melt in this poet’s mouth. Very different in tone but equally strong is the collection’s final piece, ‘On Trying to Trace my Father’, in which the profoundly pertinent extended metaphor of the astronomer – “hauling my heavy body into the dark” and seeing, for miles, everything except “the chalked comet” she’s come to find – is underwritten by connections between astrology and birth, between genetic and embodied selves.

     In between are several more poems about the absence of natural parents. Sylvia Plath, Jackie Kay and Sarah Maguire precede Valentine on this complex terrain. Here she is “scrawling my anger on the underground/ remembering bitterness past the pale collectors/ jangling tins at the door  my guardian smiling/ we have our charity here” (‘Home’).The broken lines seem breathless with emotion. Yet I found myself hoping here, and in the opening love poems, for some new image, like Maguire’s Invisible Mender, that would allow us to go beyond their undoubted authenticity. A certain laziness with feeling can compromise Valentine’s style, too. Grammatical discontiguities can suggest there’s more going on than is the case (‘Variations’, ‘Transparencies’). Repetition is used to indicate emotion rather than analogy, paradox, or other formal relationship (‘The Mother’). Almost identical openings – “Then walking...”, “Then climbing...” -– reduce the suggestive trope to a tic.

     Despite these weaknesses, though, both books are a welcome indication of the energy and variety of new writing in Britain today. Slow Dancer are to be applauded.