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

There’s a line in one of Alan Jenkins’s poems where he recalls how someone was upset by how “unhappy” he sounded in his writing. I’m not sure I’d use the same word to describe his new book, because there’s a kind of air of resignation about it that perhaps negates unhappiness, but I can see how it would be easy to assume that the condition is a constant in his poetry. Most of the poems look back at lost loves, dead friends and relatives, and dashed hopes, and an air of melancholy hangs over them as the poet regrets not being as adventurous as other people or remembers the experiences he shared with those who promised much but achieved little. A couple of the poems talk about a friend who, as he says, has drawn the short straw and is on the way out, and they do it by evoking the town where they lived:

You shared its rooming houses and its
                                               thousand pubs;
to you he was the chosen one, the brother
you’d never had, and you grew inseparable
                                                              here,
among the smells of salt, wet rot, stale beer

     The longer of the poems also brings in references to mutual friends and shared intellectual interests, as well as the popular music of the period. In a way it’s the kind of experience that anyone could talk, if not write, about, most of us having known similar times and places. The details may differ but the overall feeling is the same. Where Jenkins succeeds is partly with his skill as a poet and partly because he makes the reader believe in the people he writes about. The fact that he’s essentially doing another take on the middle-class university experience and its aftermath needn’t be a  problem if the reader looks beyond the surface descriptions.

     Elsewhere, Jenkins writes movingly about his father and mother and the pain of having to come to terms with their deaths and how he was touched by the facts of their lives. And he writes clearly at all times, using everyday language to communicate feelings and ideas.

     There is much of value in this book, though it may be that it’s best to approach it by reading just a couple of the poems each time you open it. The melancholy air can get oppressive if too much is taken at one sitting. But the poetry is real enough and powerful.