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

There is evidence of a lot of thinking going on in Houston’s book, and also recent suffering, due to a broken marriage.

     I particularly enjoyed the title poem, which starts; “After you have died,/ You may find yourself in Wales…” It beautifully combines fantasy with the reality that we my die before our death. And in this “Wales” we can expect “extremely long stories/ About the Goneness-Of-All-That-Was/ And the Hereness-Of-All-That-Is,/ Of which the endings are often truly remarkable”. I also liked ‘Wittgenstein’s War’, which picks up diary entries from the philosopher’s time on the Eastern Front in World War I to form a convincing image of the man and makes him represent all who are conscious of another life than the one they’re living, and “the hell of not being able to get over a particular fact”.

     These elegies and love poems are wry, candid, honest and rise to some winners. I found the poems in the later part of the book more welcoming, as though the pain had been digested and was allowing more room for wit. The villanelles on the break-up of the marriage are well-done but they don’t obviously have the colloquial sharpness and implication of lines like “There are, regrettably, no women here, / Except, of course, on the radio…”. He’s better at economical implication than statement, as most poets are. And the poems of mountain climbing open out onto those weird almost supernatural moments this dangerous sport can evoke, as in ‘Brocken Spectre with Glory, Cader Idris’:

He was waiting in the cloud behind you,
The white sky banked on the piled rocks
Where the summit collapses down to the lake.

Turning from the world below
You faced the mist-screen where a shadow
Stood a hundred feet away in mid-air…