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

In this collection of mainly love poems, Satyamurti explores themes of intimacy and distance, surface and interiority, privacy and disclosure, using two contrasting approaches. There is her customary, highly-analytical, almost forensic approach to subjects that I imagine enables Satyamurti the candour which is her hallmark - a style that can be compelling. For example, the sequence in the middle of the book exploring feelings around her brother’s death, has a wealth of observation of surface detail coupled with a careful, understated quality in the treatment which brings the portrait of their relationship vividly to life. The movement here between focus on particulars and general commentary is typical of Satyamurti; the impulse to tell and lead the reader - which can be mildly irritating sometimes if over-indulged - balanced by the impulse to show:

Overwhelming waste. All furniture
engulfed by takeaways,
thousands of crushed tissues.

ruined clothes, three year’s
newspapers, Marlboro packets, butts
ash on ash on ash.

Only the telephone stands clear,
and beside it, placed, poems of mine
I don’t know if you read.

     But there is also a completely opposite approach which seems to be part and parcel of the experience of being in love, which wants to abandon analysis as a means of understanding and sharing, and instead, to throw images straight up from the dark, unexplained and beautiful. Take this one from Love and Variations; “love is scordatura;/ a cello forgetting itself./ entranced by wilder possibilities;/ a C string, insanely// relinquishing its proper pitch./ It is joy breaking into a run...” . You get the idea that Satyamurti would like to let go more often and allow the image its undeniable power, but somehow her intelligence stops her. And no bad thing perhaps. Beautiful and strong though these images are, I don’t altogether trust them and find myself standing back from the material coolly, rather in the way that Satyamurti might in her poems. Occasional self-forgetfulness, embodied by the image of that cello, is lovely, but self-consciousness and distance are what seem to fuel Satyamurti’s writing, and at times make it unputdownable.