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

Szirtes hovers in some space between England and middle Europe, and in a time transcending the 30s to the present. With a wealth of image. ikon, slogan, personality, ghost, echo and feel. But throughout this compendium of a million images of time and place we do not forget that it is he who hovers and that from the compendium he composes his personal and familial history. Read in isolation from one another the poems, with considerable recourse to pun, slogan and pastiche, could leave a sense of some poetic sleight of hand where argument and theme become slack or even trite, for example in ‘Assassins’: “My people, by whom I mean those curious sets/ Of non-relations in provincial towns,/ sit ripening brightly in the Weltanschaung/ Of other poets.” But gathered into this volume any such dissatisfaction becomes minimal. One reason is that the poems, dating back to publication in 1979, are arranged here so that they gather in intensity by the sheer increase in the rigours of form reaching their apotheosis in the 15 corona sonnets near the end composing ‘Portrait of My Father’.

     His family history and personal story provide the robust structure for this collage. Yet rootlessness sustains the heart of the work: “You can only focus/ on one part of the picture, the rest shifts,/ perhaps that shifting is the true locus./ Perhaps anecdotes are frozen snowdrifts/ that catch the light just so, shapes blown/ and surfeited, whose centre remains unknown.” At the same time so does the constancy of certain kinds of experiences. One of his most striking contributions to bridging a cultural gap are the eight poems ‘The Lost Scouts’ in which the paraphernalia of the Baden Powell scout coalesces seamlessly into this account of scouts who were actually Hungarian Jewish scouts in pre-war Europe - a few of whom survived - because that paraphernalia of kit, camp, uniform, slogan, wolves, forest and Old Boys are simply a universal feature of Old- Boyishness. I can’t imagine any poet who could write better to our contemporary world of shift, linguistic mingle and displacement.