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

The late Kathleen Raine was, rightly, held in high regard as both poet and scholar. She has received less attention as a translator of verse. In Land of Evening (Enitharmon Press. 128pp; £15.00) she translates poems from the French of Jean Mambrino and does so with admirable fluency and plausibility. Mambrino, born in London in 1923, was ordained as a Jesuit in 1954. He has himself published French translations of Hopkins, some of the metaphysicals and Kathleen Raine. In Land of Evening – which has a facing page bilingual text – we have Raine’s version of his volume L’Hespérie, pays du soir, published in 2000. The ‘soir / evening’ is both a time of day and a stage of life. Both are evoked in language and imagery of great limpidity – in both the original French and Raine’s English. The poems’ explorations are both personal and social, their ‘settings’ both temporal and eternal. There is much here that is beautiful, much that is quietly powerful. This is a book worth getting to know well and slowly. Another bilingual edition – very different but equally worth the reading – is A Modern Bestiary – Ars Poetastrica (Herla Publishing, 4 Rickett Street, London, SW6 1RU. 107pp; £8.99). Gallenzi, who runs the excellent Hesperus Press, turns out to be a lively, witty poet with an essential seriousness of purpose (as one might expect from the high standards which characterize the work of Hesperus). This beautifully produced hardback (with delightful illustrations by Luis Fanti) contains original Italian texts (and vivacious, assured translations by J.G. Nichols) of sixteen sonnets (which make up the ‘bestiary’) and a discursive poem of 720 lines which savages the absurdities and pretensions of some contemporary Italian poets (though the English reader is likely to find little trouble in ‘applying’ Gallenzi’s strictures). The whole constitutes an eloquent affirmation of the power of rhyme and metre (as well as a lively enactment of their virtues), ending with a Dunciad-like vision of the current age’s “last stupidities thrown on a midden – / dung upon some cosmic market garden” and the hope that “our twentieth century, as its sun goes down, / [may] announce new humanism, a new dawn”. This is a volume both entertaining and challenging; it ought to be compulsory reading for many a poetry group and creative writing class (I don’t, of course, imply that those should be the only contexts in which it should be read). Strongly recommended.

   A brief welcome for three – very various – recent collections which I have enjoyed. Rose Flint’s Firesigns (Poetry Salzburg, Institut Für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, Akademiestrasse 24, A-5020 Salzburg, Austria. 111pp; £8.95 (plus£1.00 p.&p.) is a forceful collection, structured around the Celtic Wheel and its four phases (though continuity is emphasized more than any subdivision of the implied cycle). Recurrent, overarching metaphors hold together a collection of poems, in a variety of voices, presented with attractive formal variety. The whole is perhaps stronger on intuition and apprehension than on system and comprehension, and there is some occasional repetitiveness; but there are also some marvellous poems and passages, in writing which often has an extraordinary sensory vividness in its response to (and participation in) a natural world erotically and electrically charged. Here, for example, is part of ‘Metal Day’:

Dragonfly rests wings silvered water-nets,
hinged and jointed copper, fourfold beaded.
Crafted to a sprung attentiveness he listens
to the silver water-music messages, leaps
and shimmers at the sudden clatter of a fruitfly,
blue acid-tinted aluminium.

   Whether drawing on Hopkins or on the traditions of shamanism or alchemy, Firesigns is full of vibrant, never-dull writing. The book’s ‘thesis’ and method alike deserve more attention than there is space to give them here. Altogether quieter, but with its own interest, is David Lightfoot’s The Pentecost Partnerships (Pikestaff Pamphlets, Ellon House, Harpford, Sidmouth, Devon, EX10 0NH. 24pp; £3.00). Pikestaff was founded to, in its own words, “promote … poetry which, in an age of cultural confusion, sensational attention-seeking and metrical deafness, is quietly thoughtful, honest, witty and carefully made, more often than not within an accepted verse form, more often than not elegiac in tone”. All of which makes Lightfoot’s collection utterly suitable for their list. He is at his best in traditional forms (as in the sonnet ‘Too close, for comfort’ and the quatrains of ‘With respect, Professor Housman…’). Often reminiscent and discursive, without the discipline of (relatively) strict forms Lightfoot can seem rather flat, can make one wonder whether the anecdote was quite worth the telling. At his best he has a penetrating and observant eye for social manners and mores, and a lucid intelligence that is persuasive.

   To close, a very welcome collection of work from Colin Simms – rightly (so far as I know) described on the blurb as “the first larger-scale collection of his work”. I have known poems by Simms since at least the 1960’s and it is very good to have Otters and Martens (Shearsman Books, 58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD. 163pp; £9.95) as a gathering of one important strand of his work (Shearsman promises, for next year, a collection of Simms’ Amerindian poems). The book is precisely what its title promises – a first part of poems about otters (perhaps one should say occasioned by otters) and a second of poems on martens. There is a Northumbrian quality (in a tradition of which Bunting was merely one of the last practitioners) to much of Simms’ language. Anglo-Saxon metres and rhythms are often shadowy (and sometimes not so shadowy) presences in Simms’ texts. To make the claim for Simms’ work at its most basic – he knows his subject with extraordinary intimacy and he can articulate that knowledge in language which is often startlingly apt. There’s a rich and distinctive (at least so far as poetry goes) vocabulary here and the effects achieved are often startling; but one never feels that such effects are merely self-indulgent, everything is in the service of the subject. The book is utterly unique in its fusion of scientific observation, personal quest – and human encounter (with Hugh MacDiairmid and the scrumhalf Roy Laidlaw amongst others), and I am very grateful to Shearsman for making so much of Simms’ work more readily accessible.