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

Sean Haldane’s poems are not easily placed in context. They are open to the contemporary (reference to computers and a broadly humorous attitude towards sex) and yet often seem to be written in a way that wouldn’t have been out-of-place in the magazines of fifty or so years ago. I don’t think this stems from a reverent attitude towards the past but, rather, a cheerful disregard of today’s fads and fashions:

When I first held you, in the glimmer
Of light from the near-shut door,
You were younger and slimmer.
Now the door is closer to shut, and as before
I hold you. The light is dimmer,
But your skin still seems to shimmer.
I want you more, more and more.

It’s gentle and pleasant and if it doesn’t dig much below the surface it at least establishes a recognisable situation. Other poems dealing with personal relationships are sharper and suggest that things don’t always run smoothly. But an underlying sense of irony perhaps accents the idea that these are perennial themes and this, in turn, gives the poems that feeling of not being locked into a specific time. It’s not necessarily always a successful approach, though, and the poems can seem rather anonymous at times. But they move easily enough, and the best ones are those which aim for fairly short, direct statements:

The pinched mouth of winter breaks
Into the smile of Spring.
The sun’s warm fingers split
The bud sheath of magnolia -
Petal burst through the slit.
Bare soles of feet pass
Where plum blossom falls
On dew-soaked grass.

     Some of the other poems try to be too clever, playing with words and ideas, and once read lose their appeal. Haldane is nearer an ageless form of poetry when he keeps it simple.