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

It took me some time to get to grips with this book. A first reading left me unimpressed and thinking that too much was constructed around too little in terms of content. But I read the poems again, drew a little more from them, and on the third reading began to relate to their quiet yet emphatic way of dealing with the pain stemming from the end of a relationship and the struggle to establish a new way of coping with the day-to-day demands of the world. The language of the poems is almost classical in its simplicity and the unforced rhythm is achieved with lines that break naturally:

So little at peace in the spring evening,
I pray for strength, for direction,
but I also ask
to survive my illness
(the immediate one) - never mind
anything in the future.

It perhaps doesn’t seem a very exciting way of writing but it still manages to do what has to be done. The only drawback may be that fifty pages of poetry like this, much of it revolving around the theme of deaths and beginnings and varied only by the use of legend and myth, might seem an unpalatable meal if you’re not in the mood for it. But Louise Gluck does manage to achieve a useful mixture of the real world and the world of Orpheus, Eurydice, and others, and so places her own experiences into a wider framework. Some readers might think that the real world appears to exist for her only as a background to her own problems, but that could be an unfair criticism. What she sets out to do she does well and within its carefully defined ambitions it can be moving and attractive.