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

I’ve often liked poems by Sharon Olds when I’ve come across them in magazines, their fluid rhythms and forceful language adding up to something that can both entertain and enlighten. And it’s true that the contents of Blood, Tin, Straw do nothing to disappoint my expectations of her work. The poems take off from some idea or experience or observation, and move compellingly to their climaxes. Each is a unit of energy and they succeed best when the energy holds to its natural length, the poems closing where the energy runs out. There is a difficulty in illustrating this explanation of the poems, because it would be necessary to quote a full one, but the following lines may at least give a flavour of the writing:

When I started Junior High, I thought
I’d probably be a Behaviour Problem
all my life, John Muir Grammar
the spawning grounds, the bad-seed bed, but
the first morning at Willard, the dawn
of seventh grade, they handed me a list
of forty-five prepositions, to learn

     And so on, which is where a problem begins to creep in. At times I began to feel that the poems could take almost any direction and that, given an opening line, the poet could spin any number of words from it. Details pile up, what was said, who did what, how things looked and sounded and smelled, and often the final result was a rush of emotion, sometimes almost like surprise at the mystery of it all. My difficulty was that I found it nearly impossible to take more than two or three of the poems at a time without their individual qualities starting to turn into one compulsive word storm. This is, perhaps, an unfair comment, poetry collections inevitably bringing together work that might best be seen isolated from too much of a similar sort.

     I was never bored with these poems and their power and skill is obvious. They deal openly with female sexuality and honestly with human relationships, and they do it in a way that can, at its best, be quite gripping. I think I just occasionally wished that the voice would lighten up a little. Intensity can be hard to take in large doses and it may even begin to lose its impact if the reader doesn’t have time to reflect on what is said. I’d recommend that the reader takes this book in short doses.