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

Anyone who has ever published a slim volume of poetry will shed a tear over Colin Watts’ poem (page 64) about his collection, which ended up cushioning a garden path.  All that effort, and then only your friends and some reviewers read it, and then it is trashed.
       
   But let us be honest.  How many of us are going to rush out and spend five or six pounds on a book by someone we have never heard of merely because we are told that it ‘delights, amuses and informs’?  Some magazines (e.g. Envoi) have some very good and thorough reviewers, but in general, the review we flick through doesn’t give us a clear impression or strong flavour of the work that is being discussed.  It will be read eagerly by the poet him/herself but by no one else. Typically it will quote just a few lines, sometimes squashed into a sentence in the modern way - ‘silent, bare/ Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie/ Open unto the fields’.  If that was all you knew about Wordsworth, would you take the trouble to read more? 
      
   For a number of reasons, The Interpreter’s House doesn’t print reviews, but if I were the editor of, say, Poetry Review, this is what I would do.  I would try to mention as many collections by new or little-known writers as I could find room for.  I would ask reviewers to quote a complete poem (short, representative, the best they could find) from each volume, plus just a few lines of commentary.  That would bring a great many poets to the attention of a wider audience, allow them to speak for themselves and allow readers to decide which of them to follow up.  Failing that, read this magazine!
      
    I have not yet received any poems about the tsunami.  But many of the poems printed below take on a new resonance after all that we have seen and heard since Boxing Day.
                                                                          Merryn Williams
                                                                          February 2005

Submissions (with s.a.e.) to Merryn Williams, 28 Marston Ferry Court, Marston Ferry Road, Oxford OX2 7XH.  Subscriptions £10 for three issues to Gavin Stewart, 53 Rowley Furrows, Linslade, Bedfordshire LU7 2SH.  Single copies £3 + 34p.