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

     Twelve poems – one, admittedly, a five-section sequence; all right, call it sixteen poems. There is no obvious connection between them; they are billed on the front cover as “an interim selection of new and uncollected work including poems written since her award-winning collection Mean Time (1993), poems from The World’s Wife and poems for children”. My first question on reading this description was “why?” and having read the poems, it still is.

     There might be various reasons to publish a slim volume of sixteen poems on their own rather than waiting till one has enough for a full-scale book. They might be topical, and need to come out while that’s still so. Or they might be a sequence, which the author feels should stand alone. Or they might be so extraordinarily seminal, exciting and wonderful that no one would want to wait for them.

     None of these being the case, we need another explanation, and the only one I can think of is a bit worrying. It is some time since 1993, and we might reasonably have expected a whole new collection. But the word “interim” suggests that this might still be a while coming. Is it simply that she isn’t feeling inspired to write much (or is too busy doing other things like judging poetry competitions); that Anvil too are conscious something is due out and have cobbled together what little there is? If this is all she has written lately, it isn’t much; if the word “selection” implies that it’s the best of what she has written lately, there is still more cause for concern, because frankly by her standards not much of it is memorable.

     ‘Standing Stone’, commissioned for the opening of the Museum of Scotland, is more memorable than anything else in it. Its technique of linking artefacts to their imagined owners, who are then also linked to each other via coincidences, images and verbal echoes, creates what she is after, a sense of diversity and continuity which adds up to a people’s history. And its final section evokes quite successfully the feeling of kinship and love that tends to sweep over you when looking at the odds and ends of the long departed:

This is Betty Plenderloath’s sampler,
Unto No Image Bow Thy Knee.
Here’s a pound from the Union Bank of Scotland,
to fill six stockings on Christmas Eve.
Here’s a thumbscrew, a heart-brooch, a hair-ring,
to torture, to charm, to mourn the deid.
Here’s an ivory chessman from Lewis,
just who was in check as the seagulls jeered?

     Things then go rather rapidly downhill with ‘Three Swift Poems’. ‘Swift’ presumably refers not to Jonathan but to the circumstances of their composition, which I can believe; they look as if they took about five minutes each and the first, ‘My Favourite Drink’, is a pure waste of the reader’s time. It needs quoting in full, because I doubt, otherwise, that anyone would credit just how trivial, shapeless and self-indulgent it is:

My Favourite Drink

was in the Red Dragon
in Penderyn
near Hirwaun
in mid-Glamorgan
where I ordered up
two halves
of Dark Brains
and took them out
to drink on the grass
alone
as a whopping apricot moon
bulged in the sky.

Remembering this
in words not dissimilar to these,
I count myself lucky indeed;
as I do
that you love me still
and the end of us both
is a good few years away yet.
Cheers.

And the same to you, and why, as a reader, have I just wasted thirty seconds of my life? It’s actually “Brains’ Dark”, by the way; nobody calls it Dark Brains, but I suppose it’s petty to quibble about that when one could be asking what on earth “remembering this/ in words not dissimilar to these” is meant to convey, or who wanted to know in such detail the location of the Red Dragon.

     Apart from ‘Standing Stone’, three other poems in this pamphlet, ‘A Disbelief’, ‘Holloway Road’ and ‘To the Unknown Lover’ engaged my attention and left me feeling I hadn’t been wasting my time reading them. The rest I don’t care if I never see again. ‘Mrs Faust’ and ‘Mrs Icarus’ fall into a category I am beginning to think has been done too often. The first is at least a serious attempt to gain a different perspective, but I could see the end coming a mile off:

the clever, cunning, callous bastard
didn’t have a soul to sell.

This is ‘Mrs Icarus’ in full:

I’m not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he’s a total, utter, absolute Grade A pillock.

That isn’t even vaguely funny, because the “hillock” is so extraneous to the poem that it is obvious it’s been introduced purely for the rhyme. Eric Morecambe used the word far more credibly and inventively with his ode to the cow:

The cow roams over field and hillock,
Turning green grass into white millock.

     I’m not sure which poems in this were written for children, but I suspect ‘The Invention of Rain’ may be one. If so, I think she is on the wrong track; most children I know like their myths far more powerful and less soppy than this:

Rain first came
when the woman whose lovely face
was the sky
cried. 

     Wet, in all senses.

     I have liked a lot of Duffy’s work, and I found this “interim collection” a fearful disappointment. I just hope something happens to kick-start her work again soon.