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

I don’t usually like poems about poets being poets, most of them displaying a tendency to take themselves too seriously, but Judi Benson has a long, funny piece which neatly catalogues many of the things that can happen to a poet when he or she ventures out into the world. Readings attract audiences of thirty to halls designed for three thousand, transport fails, rooms are cold, and the would-be writers who turn up are there not to listen but to get the poet to offer a critical response to their collected works. It all sounds horribly true and humour is the only real way to deal with it.

     This particular poem is long and solid but elsewhere Benson writes with a great deal of economy, as in ‘The Last Conversation’, a touching poem about her father:

This small man
retreating into his sleeves,
is my father.

This dry brown December morning
we are walking the conversation
heads down against the wind.

It’s beautifully concise, capturing both the scene and the mood in a few words. And it contrasts with the other poem I referred to and that’s one of the strengths of the book. The poems vary widely, in terms of subject-matter and style, though all have a relaxed, conversational tone that makes them easy to read. There is never any confusion about what Judi Benson is doing, and though the experiences described are personal they translate easily into the general as the poems develop. It isn’t the kind of writing that provides any memorable lines or phrases that stay in the poetic vocabulary of the reader, and it needs to be read in bulk for its positive qualities to assert themselves, but I like the way in which people are central to it. That, and the manner in which the poems always bounce back when things don’t go right, make for pleasant reading.