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

Lotte Kramer’s Selected and New Poems is very handsomely produced and is excellent value. A pity, though, that the type-setter - if nowadays such exist - fails to distinguish between hyphens and dashes, sometimes with perplexing consequences.

     These poems, even at their most affirmative, are all touched by the dark shadow of the holocaust which - understandably since Kramer was a child refugee from Nazi Germany - haunts this writer’s sensibility. What is admirable is the directness and unpretentiousness of the writing whether Kramer is composing laments for victims of Hitler’s monstrous policies or celebrations of the indomnability of the human spirit in the face of such persecution.

     Technically the work is, on the whole, assured and a variety of forms is explored though there is one rather odd anomaly in a poem called ‘The Curse’. This is one of the very few pieces in the book, the significance of which entirely escapes me and, to add to my puzzlement, it adopts the villanelle pattern of regular repetitions yet it does not rhyme at all. This seems to me rather like attempting to write a fugue without using counterpoint. Elsewhere, however, she shows she can produce a perfectly orthodox villanelle.

     There are some charming reminiscences of the poet’s childhood in Germany and sharply observed memories of wartime England. One of these, ‘Flames’, carries in its third and last stanza, an implied statement which will chime familiarly in the minds of all who have experienced war in our time:

We learnt to eat, to dance, to sleep with them,
Those demon flying bombs. But every time
That slash of silence blunted breath, a sigh
Of dread, quite sick with guilt we’d pray for them
to pass - and someone else would have to die.