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

There is in Gladys Mary Coles’s poetry a strong sense of landscape and of how it impinges on our consciousness. The landscape could be urban, of course, but in her case it is almost always rural, with farms and fields, country lanes and high hills, vividly described. The scenes she evokes are often painterly in their detail:

Mid-July, the bindweed high in the hedge -
a tatty hedge Nain calls it, sitting in the yard,
tilting her kitchen chair, as sunlight pinks the
                                                   sandstone
of soot-crusted walls. The tall house casts its
                                                           shadow
over the dusty privet, shades Nain’s face.

It’s quiet writing, never flashy in language or movement, but with a strength that comes from its accuracy and its obvious regard for what is dealt with. I said that Coles is “often painterly” and it’s no coincidence that there are several poems which use paintings as inspiration. I’m never too sure about poems based on paintings but these are sufficiently imaginative to do more than simply describe what is on the canvas. The paintings concerned are mostly from the 19th century and, as has often been said of that period, they told stories. Coles does that, too, and it works.

     She also looks at writers like D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry (a particularly effective poem) and, in a long sequence, the novelist Mary Webb, who Coles has written about extensively in prose. I have my doubts about poets writing sequences about writers whose lives are fully covered in biographies, but she does more than repeat the facts and blends them with flashes of description of people and places and sets them in their period:

Long ago the charmed circle
now only the Bookman Circle,
P.E.N. meetings, gatherings at Anerley
around silver-voiced de la Mare:
only the dusty city trees, foggy water
of the Thames, crumbling stucco
and destitutes at every corner...

There are only a couple of dull poems in this book, and one, ‘Beginner’, that the publisher ought to have advised Coles to drop. It seems very weak and unconvincing in comparison with the rest. The Echoing Green is a good example of the kind of solid work that is done by poets working in what might be called a mainstream style and which is too often overlooked in favour of the fashionable.